George Will Quotes

[O]rganized violence punctuated by committee meetings.

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

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.

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

The case for democracy is not esthetic.

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

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

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

If there were 10,000 U.S. forces ashore [in Lebanon], authorized to move about, there would be less risk to American lives than there is with an immobile force of 1,300.

Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense - being in the country illegally - a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction.

The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.

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

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

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

Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.

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

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.

The Revolution's most important result was Napoleon, whose most important result (as France learned in 1871, and again in 1914, and again in 1940) was the invention of Germany

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

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.

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

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

Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

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

It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country - and indeed the world - has yet seen.

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

I think if you'd had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We'd have elected McClellan in 1864.

There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.

The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.

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

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

A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco's architects acknowledge that fact.

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

Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a "nondairy" product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it?

Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions.

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

Overcriminalization has become a national plague.

Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.

Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.

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

Hillary Clinton hasn't created a job.

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