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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

George Will Quotes

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

– 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.

– George Will

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

– George Will

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

– George Will

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

– George Will

America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government’s refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform.

– George Will

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

– George Will

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.

– George Will

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

– George Will

Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

– George Will

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents – judges’ decisions – rather than statutes, baseball’s codes are the game’s distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

– George Will

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

– George Will

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

– George Will

In the lexicon of the political class, the word ‘sacrifice’ means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

– George Will

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

– George Will

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

– George Will

Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

– George Will

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible ‘lifestyles’ turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

– George Will

Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn’t matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he’s fine. If it doesn’t work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won’t matter.

– 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.

– George Will

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

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

– George Will

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

– 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.

– George Will

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

– George Will

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

– George Will

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!’

– George Will

There is no ‘European people’ united by common mores.

– George Will

Pessimism is as American as apple pie – frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

– George Will

Committed partisans are generally the most knowledgeable voters, independents the least. And the more political knowledge people have, the more apt they are to discuss politics with people who agree with, and reinforce, them.

– George Will

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