Quote

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

A. J. P. Taylor

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

A. J. P. Taylor
Age: 84 †
Born: 1906
Born: March 25
Died: 1990
Died: September 7
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
University Teacher
Alan John Percivale Taylor
Peace
Preserve
War
Preserves
Great
Carried
Provide
Army
Weight
Accumulated
Security
Armies
Nations
Antiwar

More quotes by A. J. P. Taylor

Image
History is the great propagator of doubt.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
No war is inevitable until it breaks out.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
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
Image
Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
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
Image
American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Manchester has everything but good looks..., the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
A. J. P. Taylor
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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