George Will Quotes

Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.

America overflows with specious "victims" demanding redress for spurious grievances. However, one genuinely oppressed minority is getting overdue relief. Beginning with spring training in Arizona and Florida, Major League Baseball, taking pity on traumatized pitchers, is directing umpires to enforce the strike zone.

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 by being good at something you love.

We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.

It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

Hillary Clinton hasn't created a job.

(Barry) Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that. Besides, the people who care about the record book - serious fans - will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry.

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.

The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor.

Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life.

[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.

The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.

No matter how deeply you distrust the government's judgment, you are too trusting.

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

Sports is the toy department of life.

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

If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. (It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft.) Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word National.

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.

Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues.

The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.

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.

Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?

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

Twenty minutes into his presidency, Donald Trump, who is always claiming to have made, or to be about to make, astonishing history, had done so. Living down to expectations, he had delivered the most dreadful inaugural address in history.

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.

Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.

Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.

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

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness". This was not a portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.

All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority.

Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.

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.

In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.

The English language is not always the President's friend.

The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.

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

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

According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Baseball's rich in wonderful statistics, but it's hard to find one more beautiful than Stan Musial's hitting record. He didn't care where he was, he just hit.

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.

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.

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

Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right.