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A. J. P. Taylor
74 quotes
“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 (1906–1990) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Revised Bibliography" (1975 ed.), p. 729
“Taylor's Law states: "The Foreign Office knows no secrets.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Revised Bibliography" (1975 ed.), p. 730
“There are some moral principles more important to me than economics. I am against racial discrimination. I am against privilege. I am for the sovereign independence of this country and for the unity of the Commonwealth. Labour does not help me on any of these.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Why I won't be voting Labour this time', The Sunday Express (7 June 1970), p. 25
“Many nations have made great sacrifices for others and none has made more than his own two countries, Great Britain and the United States.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Grand Fleet berthed', The Observer (21 June 1970), p. 31
“The Commune illustrates the general principle that a revolution occurs not simply as a matter of material suffering, but when a regime is discredited by incompetence and failure... The Communards, though not factory workers, were proletarians in the original sense. They were the eternally oppressed, and they aspired, however clumsily, to found a society where the tyranny of the few over the many would cease for evermore.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'A shattered Utopia', The Observer (30 May 1971), p. 28
“The Arabs have justified grievances in the Middle East. The Palestinians should weigh heavy on the conscience of the Great Powers.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Little Nation I Salute This Morning', The Sunday Express (9 March 1975), p. 16
“My experiences in the General Strike cured me of communism... I decided that the Communist Party was not for me and quietly lapsed, thus escaping the soul torments that troubled so many intellectuals during the 1930s.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Class War: 1926', New Statesman (30 April 1976), pp. 572-573
“When I wrote English History 1914–1945 I believed that victory and the Attlee government made a triumphant conclusion. Now I feel differently. The incompetence of an arrogant governing class has led the country to decay and ruin.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'London Diary', New Statesman (27 August 1976), p. 268
“Our basic conviction is that the world owes us a living... We need new and ruthless leadership. We need an economic order where the creative leaders receive greater rewards and the administrators receive less.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Why sweat your guts out if a man can be £4 a week better off than you without doing a stroke of work?', The Sunday Express (3 October 1976), p. 7
“I came of Radical, Dissenting stock on both sides. A collateral ancestor of my father's was killed at Peterloo. My maternal great-grandfather voted for Orator Hunt at the Preston by-election in 1830 and received one of the medals struck in honor of "the free and independent voters of Preston." My father was a Lloyd George Radical before the First World War.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Accident Prone, or What Happened Next', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 1977), p. 2
“Monetarism has triumphed... whatever Callaghan and others may say Enoch Powell, it seems, has been right all along.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'London Diary', New Statesman (26 August 1977), p. 270
“The Normans were savage destroyers who brought ruin to a flourishing culture and stamped their brutality on the land and on its architecture. The old Radicals were not all that wrong when they attributed the evils of our society to the Norman conquest and looked back to Anglo-Saxon times as a golden age.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Foundation stones', The Observer (11 June 1978), p. 28
“The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Old Man's Diary ([1981] 1984) p. 39
“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 (1906–1990) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Personal History ([1983] 1984) p. 301
“Injustice occurs in free states as in despotic states; and the attempt to right the wrong is as unpopular and dangerous in the one as in the other – as the case of Zola shows. The difference between free and unfree countries is that in the free country there are always men who will champion the unpopular cause at whatever the cost. It is this stage army of the good, with its slightly ridiculous reappearances which alone keeps our liberties alive. The Dreyfus case, at its outset, was a disgrace for France; but because of the struggles of a small minority it ended in bringing France more glory than all the campaigns of Napoleon.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Pierre Dreyfus's biography of Alfred Dreyfus in The Manchester Guardian (7 May 1937), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1…
“The average Englishman was ashamed of the British Empire and believed (quite wrongly) that it had been acquired in some wicked fashion... This sense of sin placed British governments at a disadvantage in their negotiations with Germany: they were convinced of the justice of German grievances even before the grievances were expressed. British governments had spent most of the nineteenth century trying to prevent the growth of the British Empire, and still it had grown; German governments had done their utmost to encourage colonial enterprise, and yet their empire was a failure; clearly it was the fault of British governments and they must put it right... there they stood, ears anxiously cocked for the next German complaint. Moreover, British politicians have always been peculiarly sensitive to the charge of "unfriendliness" towards other politicians or other countries... Granville's letters to Herbert Bismarck—my dear fellow, what can be wrong?—are not unique in the record of British policy, and if the dear fellow insists on this or that as the price of renewing eternal friendship, of course he must have it.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (1938), pp. 14-15
“Anglo-German relations between 1884 and 1914 abound in these private letters and unofficial visits, culminating in another British surrender and renewed protestations of friendship. But in the last years before 1914 British politicians were beginning to realise that only one thing could end these quarrels and secure German friendship for ever—the adoption of a policy which would give the Germans what they called security, but what to others appeared as German hegemony over the entire continent of Europe. Even Gladstone and Granville would have been unwilling to buy German friendship at this price.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (1938), p. 15
“The only danger to history today is that historians are sometimes too modest and try to find excuses for their task. It is safer as well as sounder to be confident. Men write history for the same reason that they write poetry, study the properties of numbers, or play football—for the joy of creation; men read history for the same reason that they listen to music or watch cricket—for the joy of appreciation. Once abandon that firm ground, once plead that history has a "message" or that history has a "social responsibility" (to produce good Marxists or good Imperialists or good citizens) and there is no logical escape from the censor and the Index, the O.G.P.U. and the Gestapo.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Historian', The Manchester Guardian (5 August 1938), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 265
“1848 was the decisive year of German, and so of European, history: it recapitulated Germany's past and anticipated Germany's future. Echoes of the Holy Roman Empire merged into a prelude of the Nazi "New Order"; the doctrines of Rousseau and the doctrines of Marx, the shade of Luther and the shadow of Hitler, jostled each other in bewildering succession. Never has there been a revolution so inspired by a limitless faith in the power of ideas; never has a revolution so discredited the power of ideas in its result. The success of the revolution discredited conservative ideas; the failure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. After it, nothing remained but the idea of Force, and this idea stood at the helm of German history from then on. For the first time since 1521, the German people stepped on to the centre of the German stage only to miss their cues once more. German history reached its turning-point and failed to turn. This was the fateful essence of 1848.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“British history has been made by a series of true compromises. The landed classes compromised with the merchants at the beginning of the eighteenth century; this coalition compromised with the industrial capitalists in the time of Peel; and Peel's coalition has compromised with the industrial workers in our own day. Since the days of Cromwell there has never been in England a class or a party determined to force through its extreme claims, whatever the cost; the terrible exception was in the early months of 1914. No such compromise took place in Germany. The Bismarckian Reich was a dictatorship imposed on the conflicting forces, not an agreement between them.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the explanation of the paradox of the "Third Reich." It was a system founded on terror, unworkable without the secret police and the concentration camp; but it was also a system which represented the deepest wishes of the German people. In fact it was the only system of German government ever created by German initiative. The old empire had been imposed by the arms of Austria and France; the German Confederation by the armies of Austria and Prussia. The Hohenzollern empire was made by the victories of Prussia, the Weimar republic by the victories of the Allies. But the "Third Reich" rested solely on German force and German impulse; it owed nothing to alien forces. It was a tyranny imposed upon the German people by themselves.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the second World war the British people came of age. This was a people's war. Not only were their needs considered. They themselves wanted to win. Future historians may see the war as a last struggle for the European balance of power or for the maintenance of Empire. This was not how it appeared to those who lived through it. The British people had set out to destroy Hitler and National Socialism—"Victory at all costs". They succeeded. No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade. The British were the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet they remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang "Land of Hope and Glory". Few even sang "England Arise". England had risen all the same.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) said by 1990 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I called myself a Marxist from the time I became a Socialist. But, reading more history at Oxford, I began to feel that Marxism did not work. Consider the famous sentence in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto recorded society is the history of class struggles." Very impressive but not true. Perhaps all history ought to have been the history of class struggles, but things did not work out that way. There have been long periods of class collaboration and many struggles that were not about class at all. I suppose my mind is too anarchic to be fitted into any system of thought. Like Johnson's friend Edwards, I, too, have tried to be a Marxist but common sense kept breaking in.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Accident Prone, or What Happened Next', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 1977), p. 4
“Trevor-Roper is inclined to depreciate the Whig interpretation of history. I still see its merits. After all, our political forerunners stumbled on a system of government the least imperfect that has been known. We still benefit from their inheritance. We still enjoy ordered liberty. The authority of the states is still limited though not as much as it should be. Macaulay erred, I think, when he added to the Whig interpretation the great delusion of his age, which was until the other day the great delusion of ours: belief in limitless progress and in the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of limitless improvement, both moral and material.”
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Leviathan of history', The Observer (29 July 1979), p. 37