George Will Quotes

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George Will

Profession : Journalist

Birth : May 4, 1941

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

George Will

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

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

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.

George Will

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

George Will

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

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

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

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

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

George Will

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

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

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

George Will

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

George Will

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

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

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.

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

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

George Will