Quotes from George Will

It is hard to remain iconoclastic when standing waist-deep in the shards of smashed icons.

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.

The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.

Gifted teachers master the patience required for the unending business of transmitting civilization down the generations, transforming biological facts – children – into social artifacts called citizens. It is wearying work and it is a wonder teachers can summon the stamina for it.

Avoidance of lunacy is an insufficient agenda." -George Will on Ronald Reagan, 3-6-1987

In this snug, over-safe corner of the world… we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed and streaming world.

Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.

Get evangelical Christian made them receptive to the possibility of redemption in the here and now.

Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

When a politician, on a subject implicating science says, 'the debate is over', you may be sure of two things: the debate is raging, and he is losing it.

Good actors, including political actors, do not deal in unrealities. Rather, they create realities that matter – perceptions, aspirations, allegiances.

Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.

This makes an American 80-year-old's finishing sprint especially fun, because it can be focused on this fact: To live a long life braided with the life of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to an imperishable proposition is simply delightful.

it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.

Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.

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

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

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.

Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska's governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.

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.

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.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.