George Will Quotes

The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.

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.

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?

I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.

As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.

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

When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things; the debate is raging; and he's losing it.

Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.

A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.

Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.

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

Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals.

The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.

Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.

Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.

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

Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.

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

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

Term limits would make Congress bolder, more independent, and less risk-averse.

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

The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.

The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people's money.

What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.

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

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

One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.

Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.

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

We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.

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

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

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

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

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

Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.

The case for democracy is not esthetic.

When I'm in my car, I'm listening to books, audio books, always.

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

The liberal agenda: Being good to liberals

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.

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

It is an old baseball joke that big-inning baseball is affirmed in the Bible, in Genesis. In the big inning, God created ...

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.

Sports is the toy department of life.

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

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

Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.

...it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.

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

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children

Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.

Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.

[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.

All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

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

There is no 'European people' united by common mores.

Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.

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

There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.

Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.

The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work.

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

For Conservatives, seeing is believing. For liberals, believing is seeing.

Freedom is the silence of the law.

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.

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.

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

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

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

The First Amendment ... begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.

Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.

It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

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

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

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

Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.

Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.

The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.

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

Even the continents drift.

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.

The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying ...

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.