“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” Abraham Lincoln

“Today, we are perhaps more acutely aware of the continuity of history. We value the Middle Ages as providing not so much the foundation as the pattern of our civilization. We appreciate more the underlying identity of our twentieth-century way of life with that of our medieval predecessors. We have to study the Middle Ages not merely as a foundation but for their own sake. They were a period when our own constitutional ideals and traditions, which still continue and without which our civilization cannot live, were simply and vigorously expressed.” my grandfather Bertie Wilkinson in Constitutional History of Medieval England 1216-1399

“From time to time it is probably necessary to detach oneself from the technicalities of the argument and to ask quite naively what it is all about.” Friedrich Hayek, quoted in James Buchanan What Should Economists Do?

“It’s amazing what people will put up with as long as they feel they are taking part in something greater than themselves.” Radek Sikorski in National Review December 22 1989

“When you reach for the stars, you may not get one, but you won’t come up with a hand full of mud, either.” Leo Burnett

“Death is a dogma; there is no doubt about death. No Modernist can make death discussable; no Evolutionist can make death vague; no Hegelian can make death life.... King Edward was not partly dead on Friday and faintly alive on Saturday; he was alive and he was dead. Death is not a curve; it is a corner. All death is sudden death. There is an instant at which a man might answer a whisper; there is a second instant at which he could not answer all the trumpets of the world made perfect.” G.K. Chesterton in Daily News May 14 1910 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #7

“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” Mark Twain

“And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man – but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.” Ralph Ellison Invisible Man