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 is the great propagator of doubt.

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.

If there had been a strong democratic sentiment in Germany, Hitler would never have come to power . [Germans] deserved what they got when they went round crying for a hero.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.

History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.