George Will Quotes

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.

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

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.

Taking offense has become America's national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.

Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.

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

The greatest threat to civility - and ultimately civilization - is an excess of certitude. The world is much menaced just now by people who think that the world and their duties in it are clear and simple. They are certain that they know what - who - created the universe and what this creator wants them to do to make our little speck in the universe perfect, even if extreme measures - even violence - are required.

Money is time made tangible - the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner's time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom.

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.

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

Multiculturalism is a campaign to lower America's moral status by defining the American experience is terms of myriad repressionsand their victims. By rewriting history, and by using name calling ("Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!") to inhibit debate, multiculturalists cultivate grievances, self pity and claims to entitlements arising from victimization.

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

The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

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

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

The cost of appearing with a bloviating ignoramus is obvious, it seems to me. 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.

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

The primary goal of collectivism - of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America - is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality. People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government.

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!'

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

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.

Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, 'What you are doing is none of my business' and 'What I am doing is none of your business.'

Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

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

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.