Quotes from George F. Will

if we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.

Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville

In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

He [Barry Goldwater] was called "the cheerful malcontent." It takes a rare and fine temperament to wed that adjective with that noun. His emotional equipoise was undisturbed by the loss of 44 states as a presidential nominee. Perhaps he sensed that he had won the future. We -- 27,178,188 of us -- who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes.

The argument that a particular project will be "self-financing" is usually the first refuge of politicians defending the indefensible.

The republican form of government rests on representation: The people do not decide issues, they decide who will decide. Who, that is, will conduct the deliberations that "refine and enlarge" public opinion (Madison, Federalist No. 10). This system of filtration is vitiated by a plebiscitary presidency, the occupant of which claims a direct, unmediated, almost mystical connection with "the people.

Chemical cheating will be decisively routed when fans become properly repelled by it. They will recoil in disgust when they understand that athletes who are chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued.

Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.

Government breeds more government, and a lobbying infrastructure to defend itself.

Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.

Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom.

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.

A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.

In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos

Global Warming Is Socialism By The Back Door.

Global warming is a religion in the sense that it's a series of propositions that can't be refuted. It's very ironic that the global warming alarmists say, "We are the real defenders of science," and then they adopt the absolute reverse of the scientific attitude, which is openness to evidence. You cannot refute what they say.

Lacking an articulable defense of the cultural values under siege, he became a vessel of smoldering animosities.

The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.

Frank Fukuyama did what had hitherto seemed almost impossible: he made Washington think. His subject was, and in this far more sweeping book is, the place of America, and the American idea, in the stream of history. His conclusion is at once exhilarating and sobering. We have won the struggle for the heart of humanity. However, that will not necessarily be good for humanity's soul.