George Will Quotes
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Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals.
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The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
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Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
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The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.
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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?
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Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.
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Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
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The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.
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All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
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Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.
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Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
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The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.
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Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
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America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.
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The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.
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Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
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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.
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Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.
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Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.
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This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.
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It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.
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We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.
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Twenty minutes into his presidency, Donald Trump, who is always claiming to have made, or to be about to make, astonishing history, had done so. Living down to expectations, he had delivered the most dreadful inaugural address in history.
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Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard.