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"Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside."
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Exlpore more Contradiction quotes
"Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy."
"I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard."
"Isn't it a shame that some people's 'weaknesses' can be so strong."
"Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust."
"Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on."
"Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside."
Explore more quotes by Barbara Tuchman
"To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost."
"The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion."
"Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism."
"Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls."
"How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII."
"I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended."
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