George Will Quotes
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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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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.
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The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.
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I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.
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For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.
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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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A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
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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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Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn't matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he's fine. If it doesn't work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won't matter.
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The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers.
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When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.
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Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
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Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.
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Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
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Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.
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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.
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According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
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Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
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The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work.
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Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
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Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska's governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.
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Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition.
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The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
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I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.