Quotes from George Will

Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense - being in the country illegally - a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction.

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

Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.

The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.

When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

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

When I'm in my car, I'm listening to books, audio books, always.

There is no 'European people' united by common mores.

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

Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.

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

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.

We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.

Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

Freedom is the silence of the law.

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

The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.