A. J. P. Taylor Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment – and nothing more corrupting.

A. J. P. Taylor
Bismarck was a political genius of the highest rank, but he lacked one essential quality of the constructive statesman: he had no faith in the future.

A. J. P. Taylor
Taylor's Law states: "The Foreign Office knows no secrets."

A. J. P. Taylor
Bismarck] only considered the interests of his own country — always the worst offense that a statesman can commit in the eyes of foreigners.

A. J. P. Taylor
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
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
We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned.

A. J. P. Taylor
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
Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.

A. J. P. Taylor