Top 100 George Will Quotes

#1. This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.

George Will

George Will Quotes #13747
#2. It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.

George Will

George Will Quotes #14204
#3. Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

George Will

George Will Quotes #25483
#4. It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.

George Will

George Will Quotes #56917
#5. The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.

George Will

George Will Quotes #77315
#6. Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life ...

George Will

George Will Quotes #84572
#7. Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

George Will

George Will Quotes #100740
#8. Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson - one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job - about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.

George Will

George Will Quotes #107676
#9. It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country - and indeed the world - has yet seen.

George Will

George Will Quotes #111537
#10. I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.

George Will

George Will Quotes #129318
#11. Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate ... Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis ...

George Will

George Will Quotes #141009
#12. The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.

George Will

George Will Quotes #144282
#13. [President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches; listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year.

George Will

George Will Quotes #148118
#14. Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.

George Will

George Will Quotes #191567
#15. Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?

George Will

George Will Quotes #195842
#16. Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.

George Will

George Will Quotes #235090
#17. The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

George Will

George Will Quotes #245758
#18. The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny "arf" - the sound of a lap dog.

George Will

George Will Quotes #255495
#19. When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?" No, the book they turned into a bestseller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Notice a pattern here?

George Will

George Will Quotes #279213
#20. Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.

George Will

George Will Quotes #305955
#21. The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

George Will

George Will Quotes #316300
#22. The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children

George Will

George Will Quotes #378998
#23. Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

George Will

George Will Quotes #398785
#24. If there were 10,000 U.S. forces ashore [in Lebanon], authorized to move about, there would be less risk to American lives than there is with an immobile force of 1,300.

George Will

George Will Quotes #501322
#25. As Aristotle said, happiness is not a condition that is produced or stands on its own; rather, it is a frame of mind that accompanies an activity. But another frame of mind comes first. It is a steely determination to do well.

George Will

George Will Quotes #507834
#26. The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.

George Will

George Will Quotes #522613
#27. The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying ...

George Will

George Will Quotes #533834
#28. I think if you'd had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We'd have elected McClellan in 1864.

George Will

George Will Quotes #540620
#29. Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking - a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.

George Will

George Will Quotes #552562
#30. Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

George Will

George Will Quotes #566815
#31. Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

George Will

George Will Quotes #610564
#32. A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

George Will

George Will Quotes #611627
#33. Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

George Will

George Will Quotes #612205
#34. Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.

George Will

George Will Quotes #624052
#35. Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.

George Will

George Will Quotes #625306
#36. Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.

George Will

George Will Quotes #629950
#37. She is so totally absorbed in a vocation - both a gift and a mastering passion - that she has no time to be absorbed with the self's worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.

George Will

George Will Quotes #629987
#38. Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.

George Will

George Will Quotes #648127
#39. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

George Will

George Will Quotes #655734
#40. Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.

George Will

George Will Quotes #673951
#41. Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

George Will

George Will Quotes #710404
#42. The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.

George Will

George Will Quotes #717901
#43. Traditionally, baseball punishes preening. In a society increasingly tolerant of exhibitionism, it is splendid when a hitter is knocked down because in his last at bat he lingered at the plate to admire his home run.

George Will

George Will Quotes #733755
#44. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M.

George Will

George Will Quotes #747185
#45. Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

George Will

George Will Quotes #783949
#46. Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago ... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment.

George Will

George Will Quotes #791131
#47. There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.

George Will

George Will Quotes #801437
#48. [P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.

George Will

George Will Quotes #803469
#49. The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.

George Will

George Will Quotes #891229
#50. On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life's incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.

George Will

George Will Quotes #932373
#51. No matter how deeply you distrust the government's judgment, you are too trusting.

George Will

George Will Quotes #943487
#52. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores ... Capitalism is a government program.

George Will

George Will Quotes #973620
#53. The First Amendment ... begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.

George Will

George Will Quotes #995264
#54. The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money
the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1004313
#55. That is the crux of modern conservatism - government taking strong measures to foster the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1011733
#56. The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1011844
#57. In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1017764
#58. They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1056592
#59. The Revolution's most important result was Napoleon, whose most important result (as France learned in 1871, and again in 1914, and again in 1940) was the invention of Germany

George Will

George Will Quotes #1076061
#60. Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1091047
#61. Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1123901
#62. The accusation that President Clinton cares deeply about nothing is refuted by his tenacious and guileful battle to prevent any meaningful limits on the form of infanticide known as partial-birth abortion.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1158676
#63. The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1159853
#64. Sports is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things - courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1164443
#65. It is an old baseball joke that big-inning baseball is affirmed in the Bible, in Genesis. In the big inning, God created ...

George Will

George Will Quotes #1174303
#66. When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1176267
#67. There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1213858
#68. Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1250025
#69. Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1294514
#70. It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1316592
#71. What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1348563
#72. So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton's understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of 'vote' is.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1372660
#73. All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1392690
#74. A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1395005
#75. We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1434344
#76. Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1436337
#77. The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people's money.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1441563
#78. As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1442973
#79. Sports is the toy department of life.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1478980
#80. The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1479424
#81. I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1500679
#82. Baseball's rich in wonderful statistics, but it's hard to find one more beautiful than Stan Musial's hitting record. He didn't care where he was, he just hit.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1516246
#83. Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1551815
#84. Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1555673
#85. Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1581562
#86. Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1644832
#87. Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout 'Bang!'

George Will

George Will Quotes #1648859
#88. All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1655920
#89. It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1689370
#90. Political ignorance helps explain Americans' perpetual disappointment with politicians generally, and presidents especially, to whom voters unrealistically attribute abilities to control events.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1717988
#91. Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1719766
#92. When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1720785
#93. Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It's what they do. It's a metabolic urge. That's all they've done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1727737
#94. ...it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1733915
#95. The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1744238
#96. We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1755279
#97. Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1799130
#98. Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1803942
#99. The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1819447
#100. In the annals of American blunders, the Bay of Pigs may have been even more feckless, and the invasion of Iraq more costly, but we cannot yet calculate the cost of teaching Iran and others, by our role in the casual overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, the peril of not having nuclear weapons.

George Will

George Will Quotes #1827783

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