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The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

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
Provide
Army
Weight
Accumulated
Security
Armies
Nations
Antiwar
Peace
Preserve
War
Preserves
Great
Carried

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Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
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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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Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty, And the more we know the more uncertain we become.
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Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
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History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
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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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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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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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The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
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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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The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide.
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We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour.
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If men are to respect each other for what they are, they must cease to respect each other for what they own.
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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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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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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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A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.
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Perfect soldier, perfect gentleman never gave offence to anyone not even the enemy.
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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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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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