George Will Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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 curriculum.

George Will
I think baseball is more serious than any Latin American revolution. But then, I am a serious fan.

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

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
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
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
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
If, after the Foley episode – a maraschino cherry atop the Democrat's delectable sundae of Republican miseries – the Democrats cannot gain 13 seats, they should go into another line of work.

George Will
A cat does furnish a room. Like a graceful vase, a cat, even when motionless, seems to flow. But a cat also is a flawlessly designed killer.

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
If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

George Will
The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.

George Will
I believe the most important decision taken anywhere by anyone in the 20th century was the decision about where to locate the Princeton Graduate College. President of the University Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted it down on the campus, integrated with the undergraduate college. His nemesis, Dean Andrew Fleming West, wanted it where it now is, up on a little hill overlooking the Princeton golf course. President Woodrow Wilson had one of his characteristic snits, resigned as president, went into politics and ruined the 20th century.

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

George Will