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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.

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
Economic
History
Social
Left
Form
Sociology
Seems
Psychological
Forms
Seem

More quotes by A. J. P. Taylor

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History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide.
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 crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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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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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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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No war is inevitable until it breaks out.
A. J. P. Taylor
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The Foreign Office knows no secrets.
A. J. P. Taylor
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We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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.
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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A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.
A. J. P. Taylor
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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?
A. J. P. Taylor
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If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
A. J. P. Taylor
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The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
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