The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.
Barbara Tuchmanbureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
Barbara TuchmanWisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
Barbara TuchmanThe appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
Barbara TuchmanPolicy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.
Barbara Tuchman