George Will Quotes
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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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Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
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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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Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.
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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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All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
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Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.
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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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We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.
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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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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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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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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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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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For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.
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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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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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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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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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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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Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.
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The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
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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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The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.