George F. Will Quotes

The utter absence of proof for a proposition is proof of a successful conspiracy to destroy all proof.

Before the game, he [Vin Scully] waxed poetic about Wrigley Field:
She stands alone at the corner of Clark and Addison, this dowager queen, dressed in basic black and pearls, seventy-five years old, proud head held high and not a hair out of place, awaiting yet another date with destiny, another time for Mr. Right. She dreams as old ladies will of men gone long ago. Joe Tinker. Johnny Evers. Frank Chance. And of those of recent vintage like her man Ernie. And the Lion [Leo Durocher]. And Sweet Billy Williams. And she thinks wistfully of what might have been, and the pain is still fresh and new, and her eyes fill, her lips tremble, and she shakes her head ever so slightly. And then she sighs, pulls her shawl tightly around her frail shoulders, and thinks, This time, this time it will be better.

Avoidance of lunacy is an insufficient agenda.
-George Will on Ronald Reagan, 3-6-1987

Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville

Sport does not just build character, it reveals it.

There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.

He [Barry Goldwater] was called "the cheerful malcontent." It takes a rare and fine temperament to wed that adjective with that noun. His emotional equipoise was undisturbed by the loss of 44 states as a presidential nominee. Perhaps he sensed that he had won the future. We
27,178,188 of us
who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes.

Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

We used to be a nation that celebrated people who got things done. Now we celebrate people who stop things getting done.

Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.

Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.

It is a distinctive American genius, this ability to transmute subversion into a marketable commodity.

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

Government breeds more government, and a lobbying infrastructure to defend itself.

Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.

If we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.

Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with.

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce - yes, announce - that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by ... liberals.

Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, "What you are doing is none of my business" and "What I am doing is none of your business.

Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.

People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.

The almost-always-ghastly exclamation point has been lately compared to canned laughter.

Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.

Sandel hankers for the muscular debates of yesteryear, when government was not big but had bigger ambitions than today's bland Leviathan has.

The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.

Author complains about the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.

Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

Chemical cheating will be decisively routed when fans become properly repelled by it. They will recoil in disgust when they understand that athletes who are chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued.

He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

The argument that a particular project will be "self-financing" is usually the first refuge of politicians defending the indefensible.

It is hard to remain iconoclastic when standing waist-deep in the shards of smashed icons.

Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.

But one thing led to another, as things have a way of doing, and in 1948, when I was still not as discerning as one should be when making life-shaping decisions, I became a Cub fan. The Catholic Church thinks seven-year-olds have reached an age of reasoning. The church might want to rethink that.

In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.

From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.

In this age of 'whatever,' Americans are becoming slaves to the new tyranny of nonchalance. James Morris

The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word "sacrifice" means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments. – Frederick the Great

There are no final words in science. But there you have the deeply anti-scientific temper of the global warming advocacy groups: Final words.

The State of the Union has become, under presidents of both parties, a political pep rally degrading to everyone. The judiciary and uniformed military should never attend. And Congress, by hosting a spectacle so monarchical in structure (which is why Thomas Jefferson sent his thoughts to Congress in writing) deepens the diminishment of the legislative branch as a mostly reactive servant of an overbearing executive.

Global warming is a religion in the sense that it's a series of propositions that can't be refuted. It's very ironic that the global warming alarmists say, "We are the real defenders of science," and then they adopt the absolute reverse of the scientific attitude, which is openness to evidence. You cannot refute what they say.