A. J. P. Taylor Quotes

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

Well, it takes all kinds to make a mess.

There's no map to human behaviour.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

The best subjects are always people, who never fail to amaze me by their unpredictability.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

I don't really do simple. I'm not really interested in simple at the end of the day, because nothing's ever simple, and nothing's ever perfect. People certainly aren't - I would hope, anyway, because that would be boring, wouldn't it?

Man is a recording animal.

Children are like men, the experience of others does not help them.

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

You meet people, and you're like, 'I don't know how I feel about you,' and someone does something surprising that changes your mind. We're interesting creatures; we're nuanced, complicated and layered, and we make all sorts of choices.

People are unpredictable at the end of the day.

Strange are the ways of human behavior.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.