George Will Quotes

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George Will

Profession : Journalist

Birth : May 4, 1941

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

George Will

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

George Will

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

George Will

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

George Will

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

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

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.

George Will

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

George Will

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

George Will

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

George Will

Political ignorance helps explain Americans' perpetual disappointment with politicians generally, and presidents especially, to whom voters unrealistically attribute abilities to control events.

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

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

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

The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.

George Will

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

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

George Will

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

George Will

Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.

George Will