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

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Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.
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Perfect soldier, perfect gentleman never gave offence to anyone not even the enemy.
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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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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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The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
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The Foreign Office knows no secrets.
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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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We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour.
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Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty, And the more we know the more uncertain we become.
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The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide.
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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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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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In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.
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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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A racing tipster who only reached Hitler's level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.
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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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Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
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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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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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