A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
George Will

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 Will

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

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
George Will

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 Will

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
George Will

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
George Will

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
George Will

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will

Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will

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 Will

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
George Will

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 Will

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.
George Will

Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn't matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he's fine. If it doesn't work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won't matter.
George Will

Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
George Will

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

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
George Will

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 Will

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
George Will