Pie is the highest order of dessert. It cannot be disputed that the transcendent aggregation that is pie far outranks cake, ice cream and other such plebian treats. Some of the great figures of history and literature agree. We’ve discovered some original texts for your edification.

First, there’s Shakespeare. The Bard could be conflicted about pie, but he came around. First, the tragic icon Hamlet, contemplating what pie could do to one’s level of fitness, as pie guts can be a detriment when you have to fence against your girlfriend’s big brother in order to expose your uncle’s regicide.

To eat pie, or not to eat pie, -- that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of an outrageous pie gut,
Or to put down the fork,

And by dieting lose weight?

And who can forget one of the most stirring martial speeches ever recorded. King Henry really knew what would motivate his troops.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that eats pie with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

Eating pie shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England who did not eat pie

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

Of eating pie at the Great Pie festival.

Finally, Will reminds us of the power of pie in our civic affairs with Antony’s Funeral Oration for his friend Julius Caesar.

Friends, Romans, fellow pie eaters, lend me your ears:
I come to eat pie with Caesar, not to praise him.
The spoiling of pie that men do lives after them;
The sweet filling is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar did not like pie:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest --
For Brutus is a lover of pie;
So are they all, all lovers of pie --
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me, always ready to share his pie:
But Brutus says he hoarded pie;
And Brutus is a lover of pie.
He hath brought many pies home to Rome,
Whose meringue did the bellies fill:
Did this in Caesar seem a hoader of pie?
When that the poor had cried without pie, Caesar hath wept.
Hoarding of pie should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he hoarded pie;
And Brutus is a lover of pie.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly pie,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this hoarding pie?
Yet Brutus says he hoarded pie;
And, sure, he is a lover of pie.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him and his pie once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to eat pie for him?
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason and their pie! Bear with me;
My pie is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

Not to be outdone, Sir Winston Churchill moves the soul of the British people in their darkest hour.

We shall eat pie in France, we shall eat pie on the seas and oceans, we shall eat pie with growing confidence and strength, we will defend eating pie, whatever the cost, we shall eat pie on the beaches, we shall eat pie on the landing grounds, we shall eat pie in the fields and in the streets, we shall eat pie in the hills; we shall never stop eating pie.  

The tradition of pie rhetoric is not exclusively a British province you know. Americans can wax poetic on dessert also. Here President Theodore Roosevelt discusses citizenship in a free republic and its relationship to pie.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the eater of pie could have eaten more. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the kitchen, whose face in marred by flour and sugar and pecans; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to eat pie; who knows great custards, the great fruit fillings; who spends himself in eating a worthy pie; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of pie, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring to eat pie, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know pie or cobbler.

The Great Communicator, President Ronald Reagan, also discoursed on pie.

You and I have a rendezvous with pie. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of pie on Earth, or we will sentence our pie to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.