George Will Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.

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

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

George Will
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
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
Advertising tries to be a pyromaniac igniting conflagrations of desires for instant gratification.

George Will
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
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
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
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
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
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
This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.

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

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
Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private. Commercial society finds unintelligible the idea that anything - an emotion, activity, or product - is too 'intimately personal' for uninhibited commercial treatment.

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

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
It was over in a blink of an eye, that moment when aviation stirred the modern imagination. Aviation was transformed from recklessness to routine in Lindbergh's lifetime. Today the riskiest part of air travel is the drive to the airport, and the airlines use a barrage of stimuli to protect passengers from ennui.

George Will
To be an intelligent fan is to participate in something. It is an activity, a form of appreciating that is good for the individual's soul, and hence for society.

George Will
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

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

George Will
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

George Will
For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.

George Will
It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.

George Will
Football combines the two worst features of American life: it's violence punctuated by committee meetings.

George Will