Edmond Taylor > Quotes

“There are moments in history when men who are not necessarily fools or cowards behave as if they felt themselves conscientious executors named to administer some general heritage of cowardice and folly...”
― Edmond Taylor

“The collapse of the great supranational — or at least supraparochial — authorities and the dissolution of long-accepted Imperial bonds released upon Europe a fearsome flood of conflicting national ambitions, of inflamed minority particularisms, of historic (sometimes almost prehistoric) irredentisms, of irreconcilable social aspirations and of rival political fanaticisms.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“The last days of the Romanov dynasty recall one of those obsessive suicides where the victim swallows poison, slashes his wrists, and climbs over the parapet of a high bridge before blowing his brains out.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“country, wearing dark glasses, after the armistice—receiving”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“war as being merely a noisy form of peace.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“suite. He was warned that the Nation was rationing him to three wives, four concubines, four eunuchs, and fourteen servants. Other tyrants”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“Nicholas’ feelings about the Bolsheviks were in some respects akin to those of a Daughter of the American Revolution about UNESCO; the habit of viewing with alarm eventually dulls the centers of apprehension upon which survival may depend.”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

“So far from having withered away, the autocratic principle on the eve of the great conflict was enjoying, in parts of Europe, a kind of ideological Indian summer, thanks to the ingenious sophistries of various contemporary apologists of neo-despotism”
― Edmond Taylor, The Fall Of The Dynasties: The Collapse Of The Old Order, 1905-1922 [Illustrated Edition]