George Will Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

Multiculturalism is a campaign to lower America's moral status by defining the American experience is terms of myriad repressionsand their victims. By rewriting history, and by using name calling ("Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!") to inhibit debate, multiculturalists cultivate grievances, self pity and claims to entitlements arising from victimization.

George Will
The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children

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

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

George Will
Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.

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

George Will
It is an old baseball joke that big-inning baseball is affirmed in the Bible, in Genesis. "In the big inning, God created...

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 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
Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

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
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
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 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
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
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.

George Will
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.

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
The people do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide.

George Will
When a politician, on a subject implicating science — hard science, economic science, social science — says, 'The debate is over,' you may be sure of two things. It's that the debate is raging and he's losing it.

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 or courage.

George Will
In the 1950s, America was at the wheel of the world and Americans were at the wheel of two-toned (and sometimes even more-toned) cars, tail-finned, high-powered, soft-spring rolling sofas.

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

George Will
I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.

George Will
The family is the primary transmitter of social capital – the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individual's life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

George Will