George Will - Statecraft as soulcraft

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

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

George Will
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

George Will
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

George Will
I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.

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
Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a

George Will