George Will - People Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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

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

George Will
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

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
Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right.

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

George Will
Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama's critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary.

George Will
Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.

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

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