Conference speaker Charles Fried, from “The limits of law,” Boston Globe, October 23, 2007

Lincoln and Roosevelt were lucky. They chose their transgressions—if transgressions they were—well and sparingly. They did not seek to provoke—only to succeed. In fairly short order, it became obvious that they were right. Bush, through a combination of bad judgment, bad advice, and bad luck, had made the case for discretion and reasonableness disreputable. To paraphrase St. Paul: judgment, advice, and luck, and of these three, luck may be the greatest.