Quotes By George Will

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

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

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

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

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

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.

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

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

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

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.

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

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

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

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

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

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.

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!"

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

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

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.

The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

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

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.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

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.

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