George F. Will Quotes

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

Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques." Philip Howard

The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

Lacking an articulable defense of the cultural values under siege, he became a vessel of smoldering animosities.

Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.

Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.

Get evangelical Christian made them receptive to the possibility of redemption in the here and now.

Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.

Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

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.

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.

Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.

National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.

In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon

Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.

From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.

Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.

The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.

He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.

In this age of 'whatever, ' Americans are becoming slaves to the new tyranny of nonchalance. " James Morris

Time was when much of lawyering consisted (according to turn-of-the-century lawyer and statesman Elihu Root) in "telling would-be clients that they are damned fool's, and should stop.

People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.

There may be arrogance – and the laziness of someone who is indefatigable when doing what he enjoys, but only when doing that.

Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.