Top 160 George F. Will Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.”

— George F. Will

52. “There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.”

— George F. Will

53. “I suppose there’s a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it’s the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.”

— George F. Will

54. “Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season – these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?”

— George F. Will

55. “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny “arf” – the sound of a lap dog.”

— George F. Will

56. “As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.”

— George F. Will

57. “Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.”

— George F. Will

58. “Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.”

— George F. Will

59. “Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

61. “The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.”

— George F. Will

62. “Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.”

— George F. Will

63. “Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.”

— George F. Will

64. “Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout ‘Bang!’”

— George F. Will

65. “Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life...”

— George F. Will

66. “Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.”

— George F. Will

67. “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.”

— George F. Will

68. “The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.”

— George F. Will

69. “Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It’s what they do. It’s a metabolic urge. That’s all they’ve done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office.”

— George F. Will

70. “As Aristotle said, happiness is not a condition that is produced or stands on its own; rather, it is a frame of mind that accompanies an activity. But another frame of mind comes first. It is a steely determination to do well.”

— George F. Will

71. “Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.”

— George F. Will

72. “The theory is that election to Congress is tantamount to being dispatched to Washington on a looting raid for the enrichment of your state or district, and no other ethic need inhibit the feeding frenzy.”

— George F. Will

73. “All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.”

— George F. Will

74. “We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.”

— George F. Will

75. “Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.”

— George F. Will

76. “Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America’s sinfulness.”

— George F. Will

77. “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.”

— George F. Will

78. “It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country – and indeed the world – has yet seen.”

— George F. Will

79. “Sports is the toy department of life.”

— George F. Will

80. “If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.”

— George F. Will

81. “Sports is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things – courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship.”

— George F. Will

82. “The case for democracy is not esthetic.”

— George F. Will

83. “Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.”

— George F. Will

84. “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.”

— George F. Will

85. “A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.”

— George F. Will

86. “The liberal agenda: Being good to liberals.”

— George F. Will

87. “Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.”

— George F. Will

88. “Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a.”

— George F. Will

89. “They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.”

— George F. Will

90. “The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children.”

— George F. Will

91. “Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson – one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job – about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.”

— George F. Will

92. “Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.”

— George F. Will

93. “I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’ as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.”

— George F. Will

94. “I’ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that’s a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.”

— George F. Will

95. “On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it’s runny.”

— George F. Will

96. “It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.”

— George F. Will

97. “Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.”

— George F. Will

98. “Liberalism is wrong because it doesn’t work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.”

— George F. Will

99. “Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking – a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.”

— George F. Will

100. “Money is time made tangible – the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner’s time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom.”

— George F. Will