George Will Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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
The future has a way of arriving unannounced. Its arrival is jolting when people have not prepared for it.

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

George Will
Football is a mistake. It combines two of the worst elements of American life: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

George Will
Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama's critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary.

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

George Will
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.

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
The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.

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

George Will
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
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
Although advertising is communication unusually candid about its motivation, Americans love to loathe it. 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 tepted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us,' using, among other dark arts, advertising.

George Will
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.

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

George Will
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
Children are an enlarging, if sobering, experience, and often amusing. But childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

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
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
The American people are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

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

George Will
Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right.

George Will
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

George Will
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.

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
Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.

George Will
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.

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

George Will
It has been said that baseball is to the United States what revolutions are to Latin America, a safety valve for letting off steam.

George Will