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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
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Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.
George Will
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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
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The people do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide.
George Will
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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
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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
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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
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Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
George Will
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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
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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
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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
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Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.
George Will
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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
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If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
George Will
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A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.
George Will
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Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.
George Will
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A Buick had those — what? — gun ports along the hood, and a grille that looked like Teddy Roosevelt's teeth when he was in full grin over some whomping big-stick exercise of American might.
George Will
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Advertising tries to be a pyromaniac igniting conflagrations of desires for instant gratification.
George Will
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Statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.
George Will
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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
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Byrd [former Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia] rose to his current eminence from conditions of severe poverty, and he represents a poor state, so perhaps some of his grasping should be forgiven. Some, but not this egregious sort. His career has become a caricature of a particularly crass and cynical theory of representation. The theory is that election to Congress is tantamount to being dispatched to Washington on a looting raid for the enrichment of your state or district, and no other ethic need inhibit the feeding frenzy.
George Will
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The American idea is that government exists to protect, not to give, the most fundamental rights which, as Jefferson wrote … are inalienable because they exist independent of, and prior to, government.
George Will
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A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.
George Will
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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
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This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.
George Will
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
George Will
Creative Commons
Born:
May 4, 1941
(age 82)
Bio:
George Frederick Will is an American newspaper columnist and political commentator. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics.
Known for:
Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1990)
Statecraft as soulcraft
The WOVEN FIGURE
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