George Will Quotes

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

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't. ~ George Will

Even the continents drift. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

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

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

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

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? ~ George Will

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

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is. ~ George Will

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

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

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. ~ George Will

For as long as I can remember the slogan has been ... the federal government ought to behave more like families, because families balance their budgets. It turns out that families looked around and said, "You know what? Let's behave more like the government!" ~ George Will

As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.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

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

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. ~ George Will

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

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. ~ George Will

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies. ~ George Will

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. ~ George Will

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

Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard. ~ George Will

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

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

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

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

I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, 'cause he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity that, although he got 270 electoral votes and therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything. ~ George Will

Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

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

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

One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have. ~ George Will

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues. ~ George Will

In a nation committed to better living through chemistry - where Viagra-enabled men pursue silicone-contoured women - the national pastime has a problem of illicit chemical enhancement. Steroids threaten the health of the 5 percent to 7 percent of players proved, by a mild regime of scheduled tests, to be using them. Steroids also endanger emulative young people. Further, steroids subvert what baseball is selling - fair competition. And they strike at the pleasure of engagement with America's team sport with the longest history. ~ George Will

Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences. ~ George Will

Once when the Yankee's Lou Pinella was batting he questioned a Palermo strike call. Pinella demanded, "Where was that pitch at?" Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Pinella, no dummy, said, "OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?" ~ George Will

Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue. ~ George Will

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

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? ~ George Will

Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems
competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs
result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues. ~ George Will

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

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. ~ George Will

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

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it. ~ George Will

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

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. ~ George Will

In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. George will have to be George; the George they have named and will recognise. So now he consciously applies himself to thinking their thoughts, getting into their mood. With the skill of a veteran, he rapidly puts on the psychological makeup for this role he must play. ~ Christopher Isherwood

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

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

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

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. ~ George Will

Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM. ~ George Will

National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants. ~ George Will

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

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

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

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

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

There, I guess King George will be able to read that without his spectacles! ~ John Hancock

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. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

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

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. ~ George Will

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

The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old. ~ George Will

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

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. ~ George Will

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

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

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

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

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly. ~ George Will

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

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

Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor. ~ George Will

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

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

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

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

Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance. ~ George Will

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

Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us', using, among other dark arts, advertising. ~ George Will

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

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

(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. ~ George Will

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

In 2008, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going for him. He was an African-American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad for eight years. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

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. ~ George Will

The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity - the political allocation of wealth and opportunity - is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption. ~ George Will

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

Sports is the toy department of life. ~ George Will

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