Famous Quotes

Quotes by George Will

• A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.
• 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.
• Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge.
• Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.
• Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.
• Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
• Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.
• Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.
• Happiness lies first of all in health.
• 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.
• 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.
• Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!
• Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.
• Men are often biased in their judgment on account of their sympathy and their interests.
• Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.
• Our hearts were drunk with a beauty Our eyes could never see.
• Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
• Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds and noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind.
• Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
• The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.
• The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
• The test of civilization is its estimate of women.
• There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
• Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
• Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
• World War II was the last government program that really worked.