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Quote by A. J. P. Taylor

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A. J. P. Taylor
A. J. P. Taylor

A. J. P. Taylor was a distinguished British historian celebrated for his incisive analysis of modern European history. His writings primarily centered on the political and diplomatic history of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on the Napoleonic era and the two World Wars. Taylor's writing was marked by its wit and clarity, making intricate historical events understandable to a broad readership. more

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“This might explain why Obama gave billions to Wall Street crooks, and dragged the Iraq and Afghan wars on and on. Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing... We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

“It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.”