George Will Quotes
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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.
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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.
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There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
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Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.
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An alloy of innocence and arrogance, young (Ted) Williams came to Boston when it had four morning and four evening local newspapers engaged in perpetual circulation wars. He became grist for their mills, and his wars with the sportswriters brought out the worst in him, and cost him. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards and finished second four times. Several of those times he would have won had he not had such poisonous relations with the voting press.
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Sports is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things - courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship.
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The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children
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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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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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Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
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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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Let's note, that in what I consider the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime - something not exampled since Jane Fonda sat on the anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to be photographed - Mr. McDermott said in effect, not in effect, he said it, we should take Saddam Hussein at his word and not take the President at his word. He said the United States is simply trying to provoke. I mean, why Saddam Hussein doesn't pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know.
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Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
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Libertarian presidential candidate André Marrou's idea is that "government power is opposed to individual liberty." Must we still debate such sophomoric notions?... Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value.
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Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.
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In September 1942 the U.S. government purchased 58,575 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee. Soon there was a town, Oak Ridge, and amazing scientific facilities. Thirty-four months after the purchase, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. After 43 months in Iraq, U.S. forces still struggle to cope with improvised explosive devices.
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When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?" No, the book they turned into a bestseller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Notice a pattern here?
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For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.
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I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, 'cause he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity that, although he got 270 electoral votes and therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything.
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What is really shocking in America isn't what's done in and by Washington that is illegal by that what is done in and by Washington that's legal.
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As Aristotle said, happiness is not a condition that is produced or stands on its own; rather, it is a frame of mind that accompanies an activity. But another frame of mind comes first. It is a steely determination to do well.
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In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.
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The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.
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[Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.