There is far less to the Presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye.

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.

Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.

Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.