Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
A. J. P. Taylor
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
War
History
Human
Blunders
Humans
Wickedness
Witty
Shape
Shapes
Usually
More quotes by A. J. P. Taylor
There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.
A. J. P. Taylor
The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.
A. J. P. Taylor
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
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
The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
A. J. P. Taylor
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
Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty, And the more we know the more uncertain we become.
A. J. P. Taylor
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
Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
A. J. P. Taylor
History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
A. J. P. Taylor
A racing tipster who only reached Hitler's level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.
A. J. P. Taylor
History is the great propagator of doubt.
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
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
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
Psychoanalysts believe that the only normal people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.
A. J. P. Taylor
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
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
Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.
A. J. P. Taylor
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
