George Will Quotes
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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.
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Remarkably, [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was reading her statement. So her mare's-nest of inapposite words and unclear thoughts cannot be excused as symptoms of Biden's Disease, that form of logorrhea that causes victims, such as Sen. Joe Biden, to become lost on the syntactical back roads of their extemporaneous rhetoric.
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Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.
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The English language is not always the President's friend.
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World War II was the last government program that really worked.
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Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It's what they do. It's a metabolic urge. That's all they've done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office.
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Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.
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Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions.
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Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate... Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis.
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If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
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Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
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We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.
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The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
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I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
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It was over in a blink of an eye, that moment when aviation stirred the modern imagination. Aviation was transformed from recklessness to routine in Lindbergh's lifetime. Today the riskiest part of air travel is the drive to the airport, and the airlines use a barrage of stimuli to protect passengers from ennui.
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I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.
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A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.
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Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?
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Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.
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Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.
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In the lexicon of the political class, the word 'sacrifice' means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.
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[The World Trade Center and the Pentagon] have drawn, like gathered lightning, the anger of the enemies of civilization. Those enemies are always out there.... Americans are slow to anger but mighty when angry, and their proper anger now should be alloyed with pride. They are targets because of their virtues-principally democracy, and loyalty to those nations which, like Israel, are embattled salients of our virtues in a still-dangerous world.
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Overcriminalization has become a national plague.
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The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.