61 Quotes by 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.

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

History is the great propagator of doubt.

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.

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.

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

Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

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.