Quotes from George F. Will

Education has been assigned a large and, it seems, ever expanding role in maintaining social equilibrium by buttressing self-control. And in fertilizing the soil of patriotism, which presupposes a purpose beyond, a purpose sometimes higher than, that of the individual. So, patriotism involves transcending, or circumscribing, the value of individual autonomy.

In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom on the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Limits to the wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none." Note well: the community's right is "absolute.

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

A rights-centered society, must, however, take seriously the fact that duties are not natural. They must be taught. Self-interest is common and steady; virtue is rare and unpredictable. A society devoted to guaranteeing a broad scope for self-interested behavior must be leavened by virtue. So measures must be taken to make virtue less rare and more predictable. Among those measures, Americans have always considered education crucial.

Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page. And when the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race."65

Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.

Relief pitchers have only recently begun receiving proper recognition. When Whitey Ford rose at the New York Baseball Writers banquet to receive the Cy Young Award for the 1961 season, he said he had a nine-minute speech but would deliver only seven minutes of it. He would let Luis Arroyo, who had saved so many of Ford's wins, do the final two minutes.

In this age of 'whatever,' Americans are becoming slaves to the new tyranny of nonchalance. " James Morris

From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.

24 If so, the more resources that are invested in education, the more stratified society will become. If education is going to create and widen disparities between citizens, it must take care to inculcate some commonalities. Otherwise, links of shared values and understandings will become dangerously attenuated.

The object of government," wrote Madison in Federalist 62, is "the happiness of the people."29 He and his fellow Founders conceived of happiness as Aristotle did, as a durable state of worthy satisfaction with life. To be worthy, satisfaction must flow from the vigorous employment of the faculties that make us human: individual reasoning and social participation. Happiness, therefore, is an activity.

This book is, among other things, a summons to pessimism. What is needed now, and what it is especially incumbent on conservatives to provide, is intelligent pessimism that is more than a mere mood. It should be a mentality grounded in a philosophic tradition that has a distinguished pedigree, and that is validated by abundant historical evidence for this proposition: Nothing lasts.

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

The legislative branch writes laws, the head of the executive branch takes care that the laws are faithfully executed, at which point the judiciary is perpetually poised to scrutinize the content and application of the laws. Which makes the judiciary the epicenter of constitutional government.

Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.

Progressives still express their worries in an essentially 1930s vocabulary of distributive justice, understood in economic, meaning material, terms. This assumes a reassuringly mundane politics of splittable differences—how much concrete to pour, how many crops to subsidize by how much, which factions shall get what.

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

We have come a long way from sod huts and muddy boots to an economy that produces billions of dollars' worth of soap. And we may be learning what Mark Twain meant: "Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Some people who fancy themselves intellectually emancipated—who think themselves liberated from what they call a stultifying cultural inheritance—actually reside in what G. K. Chesterton called "the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.

Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues.

There may be arrogance – and the laziness of someone who is indefatigable when doing what he enjoys, but only when doing that.

Americans] correctly believe that its political arrangements are universal truths, and the understanding of the human condition that those arrangements reflect are superior to other nations' arrangements.

their happiness as some other tribe's unhappiness. As a quintessentially American voice, that of Robert Frost,

He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.