George Will Quotes - Page 6

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

[O]rganized violence punctuated by committee meetings.

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

When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.

The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money -- the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.

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

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.

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

With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care - expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed "fiscal cliff," the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party's agenda.

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

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 English language is not always the President's friend.

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

The case for democracy is not esthetic.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.

The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.