George Will - American Quotes

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

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
Reformers desperate to resuscitate taxpayer funding [of elections] cite the supposedly scandalous fact that each party's 2008 presidential campaign may spend $500 million. If so, Americans volunteering to fund the dissemination of speech about candidates for the nation's most consequential office will contribute $1 billion, which is about half the sum they spend annually on Easter candy. Some scandal.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.

George Will
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