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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.
George Will -
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
George Will
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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
George Will -
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
George Will -
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.
George Will -
I think if you'd had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We'd have elected McClellan in 1864.
George Will -
All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.
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 portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.
George Will
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Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M.
George Will -
Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
George Will -
Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.
George Will -
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
George Will -
The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication.
George Will -
The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.
George Will
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For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.
George Will -
Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?
George Will -
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
George Will -
(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made.
George Will -
The First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.
George Will -
The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.
George Will
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[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.
George Will -
Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.
George Will -
A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco's architects acknowledge that fact.
George Will -
Louisville, KY - Barack Obama lost Kentucky in 2012 by 23 points, yet the state remains closely divided about re-electing the man whose parliamentary skills uniquely qualify him to restrain Obama's executive overreach. So, Kentucky's Senate contest is a constitutional moment that will determine whether the separation of powers will be reasserted by a Congress revitalized by restoration of the Senate's dignity.
George Will