For those who were confident that Washington could show self-restraint without legal force, this has been an extremely expensive lesson.

I'm sure Bob regards it as an expensive lesson for us, a generation later.

"At 50 bucks a foot, it's an expensive lesson," he said.

"I learned an expensive lesson - get approvals before completing a final version."

Hopefully California's government will listen after this expensive lesson in constitutional law.

The hard and expensive lesson he learnt from the sorry business was that the game could do without him.

At $25 billion for 100 planes, that is an expensive lesson to learn about the limitations of technology.

Interior construction work can be an expensive lesson in urban chaos and union muscle.

Travis promised to teach us, and I suspected they might be expensive lessons.

Once the dust settles, this will prove to be an expensive lesson in network security.