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Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.

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
Shapes
Usually
War
History
Human
Blunders
Humans
Wickedness
Witty
Shape

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The Foreign Office knows no secrets.
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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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History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
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Manchester has everything but good looks..., the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery.
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.
A. J. P. Taylor
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Perfect soldier, perfect gentleman never gave offence to anyone not even the enemy.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
A. J. P. Taylor
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Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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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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.
A. J. P. Taylor