“Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.” John Steinbeck

“If Jesus Christ had taken polls he never would have preached the Gospel.” Congressman Henry Hyde, quoted by Allan Fotheringham in Ottawa Sun December 16 1998.

“’You need not be afraid to be flippant, but you ought to have a horror of being dull.” Lord Bryce addressing “the assembled historians of America” according to Stephen Leacock “Literature and education in America” in Social Criticism: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays

“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