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There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.

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
Agreeable
Establishment
Peace
Nothing
Make
Life
Corrupting

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Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
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I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, What happened next?
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Perfect soldier, perfect gentleman never gave offence to anyone not even the enemy.
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The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
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History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
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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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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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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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The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.
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Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
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History is the great propagator of doubt.
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If there had been a strong democratic sentiment in Germany, Hitler would never have come to power . [Germans] deserved what they got when they went round crying for a hero.
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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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Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.
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Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
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George VI in the conventional parlance was a Good King who sacrificed his life to his sense of duty. If we are to have monarchs it would be hard to find a better one.
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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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No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.
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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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Psychoanalysts believe that the only normal people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.
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