Top 160 George F. Will Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

3. “The future has a way of arriving unannounced.”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

5. “Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.”

— George F. Will

6. “It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.”

— George F. Will

7. “The cultivation – even celebration – of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today’s culture of complaint.”

— George F. Will

8. “Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.”

— George F. Will

9. “All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.”

— George F. Will

10. “In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.”

— George F. Will

11. “It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.”

— George F. Will

12. “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.”

— George F. Will

13. “The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying...”

— George F. Will

14. “Freedom is the silence of the law.”

— George F. Will

15. “Nationalism is blamed for this century’s wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.”

— George F. Will

16. “Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.”

— George F. Will

17. “Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”

— George F. Will

18. “The phrase ‘domestic cat’ is an oxymoron.”

— George F. Will

19. “Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a “nondairy” product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it?”

— George F. Will

20. “Term limits would make Congress bolder, more independent, and less risk-averse.”

— George F. Will

21. “I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.”

— George F. Will

22. “Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, ‘What you are doing is none of my business’ and ‘What I am doing is none of your business.’”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

25. “The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.”

— George F. Will

26. “National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.”

— George F. Will

27. “Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.”

— George F. Will

28. “In 1976, Jimmy Carter – peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that – somewhat tapped America’s durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.”

— George F. Will

29. “The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn’t.”

— George F. Will

30. “Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.”

— George F. Will

31. “Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind’s self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind’s existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.”

— George F. Will

32. “It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.”

— George F. Will

33. “Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy – judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes – because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.”

— George F. Will

34. “Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

— George F. Will

35. “The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.”

— George F. Will

36. “Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.”

— George F. Will

37. “Baseball is Heaven’s gift to mortals.”

— George F. Will

38. “We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.”

— George F. Will

39. “All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child’s program of subverting authority.”

— George F. Will

40. “Taking offense has become America’s national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.”

— George F. Will

41. “One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.”

— George F. Will

42. “Correct thinkers think that ‘baseball trivia’ is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.”

— George F. Will

43. “The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.”

— George F. Will

44. “We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.”

— George F. Will

45. “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.”

— George F. Will

46. “A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.”

— George F. Will

47. “The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.”

— George F. Will

48. “The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people’s money.”

— George F. Will

49. “No matter how deeply you distrust the government’s judgment, you are too trusting.”

— George F. Will

50. “Remember Henry Adam’s jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?”

— George F. Will