Top 160 George F. Will Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.”

— George F. Will

102. “Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments. – Frederick the Great.”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

106. “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tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it – after the 16th Amendment is repealed.”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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— George F. Will

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

116. “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

117. “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

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

— George F. Will

119. “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

120. “Overcriminalization has become a national plague.”

— George F. Will

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 “As has been said, standards are always out of date – that is why we call them standards.”

— George F. Will

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

129. “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

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

— George F. Will

131. “Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

133. “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

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

— George F. Will

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

144. “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

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

— George F. Will

146. “I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.”

— George F. Will

147. “On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life’s incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.”

— George F. Will

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

— George F. Will

149. “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

150. “Even the continents drift.”

— George F. Will