Quote

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.

George Will

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Will
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 4
Columnist
Journalist
Champaign
Illinois
George F. Will
George Frederick Will
Foolishly
Behave
Freedom
Means
Mean
Basely
Coarsely

More quotes by George Will

Image
It was over in a blink of an eye, that moment when aviation stirred the modern imagination. Aviation was transformed from recklessness to routine in Lindbergh's lifetime. Today the riskiest part of air travel is the drive to the airport, and the airlines use a barrage of stimuli to protect passengers from ennui.
George Will
Image
[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.
George Will
Image
Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
George Will
Image
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
George Will
Image
I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.
George Will
Image
Overcriminalization has become a national plague.
George Will
Image
Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
George Will
Image
As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.
George Will
Image
Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.
George Will
Image
The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.
George Will
Image
Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
George Will
Image
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 Will
Image
Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.
George Will
Image
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 Will
Image
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 Will
Image
We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.
George Will
Image
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 Will
Image
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
George Will
Image
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 Will
Image
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 Will