George Will Quotes (66 Quotes)

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.

There is a declining number of Americans paying income taxes, while more and more people are dependent for things that fewer and fewer people are paying for.

In his Sept. 16 op-ed column, Solidarity Isn't Forever, ... breaking its promise to confine itself to economic issues and not inject itself into academic decision making, such as the assignment of teachers to particular courses.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout "Bang!"

If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all organizations with titles beginning with the word National.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

The reformers' preferred metaphor is leveling the playing field. They should listen to the logic of their language fields are leveled by bulldozers.

Convictions cause conflict.

Being sixty in Washington sometimes feels like having had one year's experience sixty times. However, age can confer a certain calm about the passing circus, a preference for understatement and for people with low emotional metabolisms.

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.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

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''

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.

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.

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.

When America uses power, it makes people angry, but it gets their attention.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible "lifestyles" turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

Although advertising is communication unusually candid about its motivation, Americans love to loathe it. As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of experts become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some they is manipulating us, using, among other dark arts, advertising.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.

This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant

She is so totally absorbed in a vocation both a gift and a mastering passion that she has no time to be absorbed with the self's worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it

Scholars concede but cannot explain the amazing chemistry of Cub fans' loyalty. But their unique steadfastness through thin and thin has something to do with the team's Franciscan simplicity.

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.

Terrorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration's argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the 'sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs' which is refuted by the Constitution's plain language, which empowers Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces, and make laws 'necessary and proper' for the execution of all presidential powers.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

The homosexual subculture based on brief, barren assignations is, in part, a dark mirror of the sex-obsessed majority culture.

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

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf - the sound of a lap dog.

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.

Not all conservatives find the movie a rebuke to Darwin's theory. If an intelligent designer designed nature, ... why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins

Americans, endowed by their solicitous government with an ever-expanding array of entitlements, now have the whiny mentality that an entitlement culture breeds.

The theory is that election to Congress is tantamount to being dispatched to Washington on a looting raid for the enrichment of your state or district, and no other ethic need inhibit the feeding frenzy

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

All God's chillun got shoes or can get them in Mrs Marcos's closet, which is large enough to house Mr and Mrs Duvalier, itinerant nonlaborers.

It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.

Socialism, born and raised in France, is unpersuasive even to the promiscuously persuadable French.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

It is committee meetings, called huddles, separated by outbursts of violence.

Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.