Top 30 A. J. P. Taylor Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

2. “No war is inevitable until it breaks out.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

3. “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

4. “Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

5. “We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

6. “Perfect soldier, perfect gentleman never gave offence to anyone not even the enemy.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

7. “Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight ‘just’ wars and kill millions.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

8. “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

9. “The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

10. “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

11. “Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

12. “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

13. “The Foreign Office knows no secrets.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

14. “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

15. “There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

16. “History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

17. “If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

18. “Fascism was little more than terrorist rule by corrupt gangsters. Mussolini was not corrupt himself but he did nothing except to rage impotently.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

19. “A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

20. “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

21. “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

22. “The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

23. “The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide...”

— A. J. P. Taylor

24. “The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

25. “In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer – the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

26. “Psychoanalysts believe that the only “normal” people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

27. “History is the great propagator of doubt.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

28. “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

29. “A racing tipster who only reached Hitler’s level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

30. “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.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

31. “The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

32. “If men are to respect each other for what they are, they must cease to respect each other for what they own.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

33. “One of the penalties of being president of the United States is that you must subsist for four years without drinking anything except Californian wine.”

— A. J. P. Taylor

34. “There is nothing nicer than nodding off while reading. Going fast asleep and then being woken by the crash of the book on the floor, then saying to yourself, well it doesn’t matter much. An admirable feeling.”

— A. J. P. Taylor