George Will Quotes

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

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.
George Will

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

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

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

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
George Will

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
George Will

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will

Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will

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.
George Will

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

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.
George Will

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.
George Will

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

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

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

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!"
George Will

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
George Will

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
George Will

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
George Will

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
George Will

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.
George Will

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

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

You really don't want a president who is a football fan. Football combines the worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will