A. J. P. Taylor Quotes

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

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

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

You must read history forward and not backward.

I write to learn the flow of history.

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.