Quotes from George F. Will

Almost everyone will be nice to almost everyone, using money taken from a few.

I grew up in Central Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made a historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinal fans and grew up happy and liberal, and I became a Cub fan and grew up embittered and conservative.

The permutations of rent-seeking are as many as the administrative state is vast. Rent-seeking is the activity of attempting to increase one's income without increasing the quantity or quality of the goods or services offered to customers. It is the attempt to manipulate public power for private advantage—to get government to improve your economic circumstances by conferring a benefit on you or a handicap on your competitors.

In another dissent, which became famous and influential, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted an almost unlimited government police power flowing from "the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law." Notice that Holmes' majoritarianism led him to assert an essentially unlimited right.

Progressives celebrated Holmes' assertion that government should be able to exercise almost untrammeled police powers as long as government asserts what would come to be called a "rational basis" for exercises of this power. And a mere assertion should suffice.

People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.

Soothing assumptions about the good faith and shared interests of antagonists are natural to democracy, as is the desire to spend money on things other than defense. Getting a democracy to do what does not come naturally requires leadership.

Sandel hankers for the muscular debates of yesteryear, when government was not big but had bigger ambitions than today's bland Leviathan has.

But one thing led to another, as things have a way of doing, and in 1948, when I was still not as discerning as one should be when making life-shaping decisions, I became a Cub fan. The Catholic Church thinks seven-year-olds have reached an age of reasoning. The church might want to rethink that.

The State of the Union has become, under presidents of both parties, a political pep rally degrading to everyone. The judiciary and uniformed military should never attend. And Congress, by hosting a spectacle so monarchical in structure (which is why Thomas Jefferson sent his thoughts to Congress in writing) deepens the diminishment of the legislative branch as a mostly reactive servant of an overbearing executive.

In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon

Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.

Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques." Philip Howard

it is arguable that the most molecular word in political discourse, the noun that denotes something on which all else depends and builds, is neither "justice" nor "freedom" nor "equality." It is "family." Without the nurturing and disciplining done in intact families, individuals are apt to be ill-equipped to exercise the freedom to become unequal, and therefore are handicapped in the pursuit of justice for themselves and others.

John Cochrane notes: "Rich people mostly give away or reinvest their wealth. It's hard to see just how this is a problem.…Look at Versailles. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, lives like Marie Antoinette. And nobody in the US lives like her peasants.

At this point, the Grumpy Economist becomes the Incredulous Economist: "If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?

Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.

Time was when much of lawyering consisted (according to turn-of-the-century lawyer and statesman Elihu Root) in "telling would-be clients that they are damned fool's, and should stop.

Sport does not just build character, it reveals it.

Speaking for George Will, on whose thinking I am world's foremost authority, I say: not necessarily. The heavy hitters do have heavy responsibilities.

It is a distinctive American genius, this ability to transmute subversion into a marketable commodity.

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.