George Will quotes - page 4

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. (George Will)
Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated. View quote
George Will
Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition. View quote
George Will
Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. View quote
George Will
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness. View quote
George Will
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tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed. View quote
George Will
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. View quote
George Will
I believe the most important decision taken anywhere by anyone in the 20th century was the decision about where to locate the Princeton Graduate College. President of the University Thomas Woodrow Wilson wanted it down on the campus, integrated with the undergraduate college. His nemesis, Dean Andrew Fleming West, wanted it where it now is, up on a little hill overlooking the Princeton golf course. President Woodrow Wilson had one of his characteristic snits, resigned as president, went into politics and ruined the 20th century. View quote
George Will
Reformers desperate to resuscitate taxpayer funding [of elections] cite the supposedly scandalous fact that each party's 2008 presidential campaign may spend $500 million. If so, Americans volunteering to fund the dissemination of speech about candidates for the nation's most consequential office will contribute $1 billion, which is about half the sum they spend annually on Easter candy. Some scandal. View quote
George Will
If, after the Foley episode – a maraschino cherry atop the Democrat's delectable sundae of Republican miseries – the Democrats cannot gain 13 seats, they should go into another line of work. View quote
George Will
Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it. (George Will)
When a politician, on a subject implicating science - hard science, economic science, social science - says, ‘The debate is over,' you may be sure of two things. It's that the debate is raging and he's losing it. View quote
George Will
The family is the primary transmitter of social capital – the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individual's life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty. View quote
George Will
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. View quote
George Will
I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, 'cause he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity that, although he got 270 electoral votes and therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything. View quote
George Will
I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government. View quote
George Will
In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure. View quote
George Will
Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska's governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states. View quote
George Will
Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty. View quote
George Will
I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did. View quote
George Will
There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government. (George Will)
Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama's critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary. View quote
George Will
Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs. View quote
George Will
Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early. View quote
George Will
The reformers' preferred metaphor is leveling the playing field. They should listen to the logic of their language fields are leveled by bulldozers. View quote
George Will