Quotes from George Will

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

The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.

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!'

Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.

If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration - and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration - is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.

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

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.

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

I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.

Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.

Only recently - about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy - have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.'

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.

The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.

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

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

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

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

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

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

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

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.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.