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History is the great propagator of doubt.

A. J. P. Taylor

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A. J. P. Taylor
Age: 84 †
Born: 1906
Born: March 25
Died: 1990
Died: September 7
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
University Teacher
Alan John Percivale Taylor
Doubt
History
Great

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The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.
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The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.
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When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.
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Psychoanalysts believe that the only normal people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.
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History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.
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The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.
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There is nothing nicer than nodding off while reading. Going fast asleep and then being woken by the crash of the book on the floor, then saying to yourself, well it doesn't matter much. An admirable feeling.
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In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction.
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We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour.
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There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.
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No war is inevitable until it breaks out.
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A racing tipster who only reached Hitler's level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.
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Conformity may give you a quiet life it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
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The Foreign Office knows no secrets.
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All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
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American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.
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Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty, And the more we know the more uncertain we become.
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In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.
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One of the penalties of being president of the United States is that you must subsist for four years without drinking anything except Californian wine.
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Fascism was little more than terrorist rule by corrupt gangsters. Mussolini was not corrupt himself but he did nothing except to rage impotently.
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