There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.
A. J. P. TaylorRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote signifies a pivotal moment in history where traditional political norms were challenged, leading to the formation of the modern world.
A. J. P. Taylor highlights the year 1917 as a turning point in European and world history, marking the shift from established political conventions to revolutionary ideas championed by leaders like Lenin and Wilson. This moment is portrayed as the genesis of contemporary political thought and society, suggesting that ideals of a perfect society began to take precedence over traditional practices.
In practice
During a lecture on the impact of World War I on modern politics.
There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.
The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.
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.
If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.
He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
Oftentimes, a history book in school will talk about the Underground Railroad as if it's one sentence. But thousands of people decided to run, and they single-handedly changed the trajectory of our nation. By running to the North, they put a face to slavery, which recruited a lot of abolitionists.
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.
There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.
This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact… I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.
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