George Will Quotes

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.

It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.

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!'

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.

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.

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents - judges' decisions - rather than statutes, baseball's codes are the game's distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

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.

I hear Democrats say, 'The Affordable Care Act is the law,' as though we're supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.

The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers.

Sports is the toy department of life.

Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.

Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.

[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.

Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a "nondairy" product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it?

They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.

Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.

We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.

The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government's size is at any moment, is the bare minimum neccessary to forestall intolerable suffering.

The English language is not always the President's friend.

Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska's governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.

Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.

Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season
these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?

Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.

On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it's runny.

The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.

When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things; the debate is raging; and he's losing it.

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.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

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.

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?

One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.

Overcriminalization has become a national plague.

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.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.

Americans, more than most people, believe that history is the result of individual decisions to implement conscious intentions. For Americans, more than most people, history has been that ... This sense of openness, of possibility and autonomy, has been a national asset as precious as the topsoil of the Middle West. But like topsoil, it is subject to erosion; it requires tending. And it is not bad for Americans to come to terms with the fact that for them too, history is a story of inertia and the unforeseen.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a

A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco's architects acknowledge that fact.

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.

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.

Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

The First Amendment ... begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.

The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.

Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.

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

Even the continents drift.

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.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS's behavior "inappropriate. " No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.

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.

There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambience in public spaces. Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing. It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion.

Mitt Romney's losing at this point in a big way. If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why - given that Mr. Romney knew the day that [Sen. John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again - that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest.

Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

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.

Money is time made tangible - the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner's time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom.

The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication.

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.

Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.

Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition.

No matter how deeply you distrust the government's judgment, you are too trusting.

Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

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.

(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.

Not since the multiplication of the loaves and fishes near the Sea of Galilee has there been creativity as miraculous as that of the Keystone XL pipeline. It has not yet been built but already is perhaps the most constructive infrastructure project since the Interstate Highway System. It has accomplished an astonishing trifecta

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.

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.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

The case for democracy is not esthetic.

All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority.

The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others
this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

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.

That is the crux of modern conservatism - government taking strong measures to foster the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence.

The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process ... as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

[A] re-elected McConnell, with a Republican majority, would, he says, emulate his model of majority leadership - the 16 years under a Democrat, Montana'€s Mike Mansfield. He, like McConnell, had a low emotional metabolism but a subtle sense of the Senate's singular role in the nation's constitutional equilibrium.

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

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.

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.

I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.

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.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

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?

It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.

The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.

Mitch McConnell, 72, is second only to Henry Clay as the state'€s most consequential public servant. McConnell's skills have been honed through five terms. He is, however - let us say the worst - not cuddly. National Review has said he has 'an owlish, tight-lipped public demeanor reminiscent of George Will.' Harsh. But true.

A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.

Taking offense has become America's national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.

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 ...