Top 160 George F. Will Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.”

— George F. Will

102. “When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it – after the 16th Amendment is repealed.”

— George F. Will

103. “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

104. “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

105. “Baseball’s best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.”

— George F. Will

106. “Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”

— George F. Will

107. “The strongest continuous thread in America’s political tradition is skepticism about government.”

— George F. Will

108. “Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.”

— George F. Will

109. “Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.”

— George F. Will

110. “So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton’s understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of ‘vote’ is.”

— George F. Will

111. “Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.”

— George F. Will

112. “Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.”

— George F. Will

113. “Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.”

— George F. Will

114. “I think if you’d had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We’d have elected McClellan in 1864.”

— George F. Will

115. “Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.”

— George F. Will

116. “A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco’s architects acknowledge that fact.”

— George F. Will

117. “As has been said, standards are always out of date – that is why we call them standards.”

— George F. Will

118. “If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration – and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration – is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.”

— George F. Will

119. “Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.”

— George F. Will

120. “Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard.”

— George F. Will

121. “All politicians are to some extent salesmen.”

— George F. Will

122. “Night baseball isn’t an aberration. What’s an aberration is a team that hasn’t won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A’s, thank you very much. People who do it right.”

— George F. Will

123. “The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction – that ‘Europe’ has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.”

— George F. Will

124. “In the lexicon of the political class, the word ‘sacrifice’ means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.”

— George F. Will

125. “Overcriminalization has become a national plague.”

— George F. Will

126. “In Gladstone’s mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.”

— George F. Will

127. “Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

129. “Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.”

— George F. Will

130. “The English language is not always the President’s friend.”

— George F. Will

131. “The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work.”

— George F. Will

132. “Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.”

— George F. Will

133. “She is so totally absorbed in a vocation – both a gift and a mastering passion – that she has no time to be absorbed with the self’s worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.”

— George F. Will

134. “The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.”

— George F. Will

135. “We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.”

— George F. Will

136. “Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.”

— George F. Will

137. “The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, is the bare minimum neccessary to forestall intolerable suffering.”

— George F. Will

138. “A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible ‘lifestyles’ turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.”

— George F. Will

139. “Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration – which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better – has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.”

— George F. Will

140. “The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.”

— George F. Will

141. “For Conservatives, seeing is believing. For liberals, believing is seeing.”

— George F. Will

142. “Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis – how incentives influence behavior – to government.”

— George F. Will

143. “Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate. ” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.”

— George F. Will

144. “Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.”

— George F. Will

145. “The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.”

— George F. Will

146. “Stalin’s henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.”

— George F. Will

147. “Even the continents drift.”

— George F. Will

148. “The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money – the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.”

— George F. Will

149. “Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one’s friends.”

— George F. Will

150. “I don’t think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.”

— George F. Will