George Will Quotes - Page 3

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

The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.

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

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

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

The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.

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

Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.

The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.

Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.

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

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

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

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.

Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.

As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.

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.

Even the continents drift.

What is really shocking in America isn't what's done in and by Washington that is illegal by that what is done in and by Washington that's legal.

The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.

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

On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life's incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

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