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.

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.

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.

We learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

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