48 quotes
A revolution cannot be judged by the ordinary standards of academic morality.
I think you can say that the British were more responsible than anyone for the destruction of Nazism and Fascism in Europe.
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.
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)
He detested titles. This, no doubt, is why he distributed them so lavishly.
On David Lloyd George.Lloyd George (1961)
The United States remains a country where there is trial by jury and more freedom of expression of every sort of opinion than anywhere else in the world – including England.
The New Deal was the nearest thing to a revolution ever carried out in a democracy.
The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.
The things that really matter have nothing to do with politics. Love between friends. Good books. The beauties of nature.
Taylor's Law states: "The Foreign Office knows no secrets."
English History 1914–1945 (1965)
We too should be true to our tradition. That tradition is one of national independence and Splendid Isolation.
The object of policy is not to prove one's moral worth, but to succeed.
The massacre of Peterloo shook the moral prestige of the old order as nothing else had done; and English democracy owes a lasting debt to the eleven martyrs of St. Peter's Fields.
Many nations have made great sacrifices for others and none has made more than his own two countries, Great Britain and the United States.
The revolt of the agricultural labourers in 1830 was the greatest manifestation by the English people between Monmouth's rebellion and the General Strike.
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.
English History 1914–1945 (1965)
CARD (Campaign Against Racial Discrimination) should be by now a bigger movement than CND at its biggest. It isn't. We have all turned cowards.
The Commune was...heroic, with its strange mixture of patriotism and working class idealism, a mixture which no historian will ever clearly resolve.
Monetarism has triumphed... whatever Callaghan and others may say Enoch Powell, it seems, has been right all along.
The Arabs have justified grievances in the Middle East. The Palestinians should weigh heavy on the conscience of the Great Powers.
In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)