“I am quite sure your Majesty played as successfully as usual.”

A character in The Man in the Iron Mask (the 1977 movie)

“The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.”

Josh Billings quoted at www.brainyquote.com/quotes/josh_billings_141132

In my latest LooniePolitics column I say budgets have become so routinely vote-buying exercises that people cheer or boo depending if they get a good price for theirs not because they think it’s a good or bad idea to loot the Treasury for private gain.

“Study history, study history – in history lie all the secrets of statecraft.”

Winston Churchill to the author, then an 18-year-old exchange student (in the receiving line at the May 1953 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association), quoted in James C. Humes Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft