George Will

Sourced

• Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings
  • International Herald Tribune (7 May 1990)

• Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.
  • "Democrats Vs. Wal-Mart", Washington Post (14 September 2006)

• When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?" No, the book they turned into a bestseller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Notice a pattern here?
  • "Democrats Vs. Wal-Mart", Washington Post (14 September 2006)

• Reformers desperate to resuscitate taxpayer funding [of elections] cite the supposedly scandalous fact that each party's 2008 presidential campaign may spend $500 million. If so, Americans volunteering to fund the dissemination of speech about candidates for the nation's most consequential office will contribute $1 billion, which is about half the sum they spend annually on Easter candy. Some scandal.
  • "Checkout for an Undemocratic Checkoff", Washington Post (28 September 2006)

• If, after the Foley episode — a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries — the Democrats cannot gain 13 seats [to regain control of the House of Representatives], they should go into another line of work.
  • "What Goeth Before The Fall", Jewish World Review (5 October 2006)

• A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.
  • "The gift of doing very little", Jewish World Review (23 December 2007)

• There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.
  • "Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy" (1992)

Unsourced

• A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.

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

• Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

• The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

• There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

• The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

• World War II was the last government program that really worked.

• The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

• This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.

• Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

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

• (A)ctivist, interventionalist, regulating, subsidizing government is generally a servant of the strong and entrenched against the weak and aspiring.

• Anyone can have a bad century. (In reference to his beloved Chicago Cubs, who have not won a World Series since 1908)

• Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

• Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.

• Christian Science without the Christianity, sounds good to me. [referring to free-market ideology]- Interview with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, June 3 2008.

• "It is a classification that no longer classifies." (Referring to the Stimulus bill on 'This Week with George Stephanopoulos' 2/8/2009).

• "That is the fallacy of the false assumption." (Referring to Congress only having the choice of passing the Stimulus bill or doing nothing for the economy on 'This Week with George Stephanopoulos' 2/15/2009).

• "You are a pyromaniac in a field of straw men." (To Sam Donaldson on 'This Week with George Stephanopouls' 2/15/2009).