George Will Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
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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.
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National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
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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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In the annals of American blunders, the Bay of Pigs may have been even more feckless, and the invasion of Iraq more costly, but we cannot yet calculate the cost of teaching Iran and others, by our role in the casual overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, the peril of not having nuclear weapons.
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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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Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.
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[President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches; listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year.
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The First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.
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There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.
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Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.
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Not since the multiplication of the loaves and fishes near the Sea of Galilee has there been creativity as miraculous as that of the Keystone XL pipeline. It has not yet been built but already is perhaps the most constructive infrastructure project since the Interstate Highway System. It has accomplished an astonishing trifecta
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Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.
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Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.
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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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Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
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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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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?
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Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a "nondairy" product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it?