Quote

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 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
Wish
Currency
Political
Wishes
Become
Somehow
Merely
Geographic
Europe
Presupposes
Expression
Promotes
Fiction
Europeans
Rather
Euro

More quotes by George Will

Image
They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
George Will
Image
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 Will
Image
Once when the Yankee's Lou Pinella was batting he questioned a Palermo strike call. Pinella demanded, Where was that pitch at? Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Pinella, no dummy, said, OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?
George Will
Image
The reformers' preferred metaphor is leveling the playing field. They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.
George Will
Image
In the annals of American blunders, the Bay of Pigs may have been even more feckless, and the invasion of Iraq more costly, but we cannot yet calculate the cost of teaching Iran and others, by our role in the casual overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, the peril of not having nuclear weapons.
George Will
Image
I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
George Will
Image
Republicans define freedom as an absence of restraints imposed by government. Democrats define freedom as an absence of necessity, which government exists to reduce. America has not moved as far as it thinks it has beyond the argument about the New Deal, when FDR insisted, Necessitous men are not free men.
George Will
Image
Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.
George Will
Image
Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.
George Will
Image
Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
George Will
Image
One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.
George Will
Image
Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
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
America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.
George Will
Image
Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.
George Will
Image
The theory is that election to Congress is tantamount to being dispatched to Washington on a looting raid for the enrichment of your state or district, and no other ethic need inhibit the feeding frenzy.
George Will
Image
Overcriminalization has become a national plague.
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
I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, 'cause he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity that, although he got 270 electoral votes and therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything.
George Will
Image
The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children
George Will