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.

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.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.

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.

The Foreign Office knows no secrets.

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.

Psychoanalysts believe that the only "normal" people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.