An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back—it is already so far.
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)