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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 Will

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George Will
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: May 4
Columnist
Journalist
Champaign
Illinois
George F. Will
George Frederick Will
Despair
Dispirited
Please
Expresses
History
Pleases
People
Euro
Holocaust
Shakespeare
European
Cultural

More quotes by George Will

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Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life.
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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.
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As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.
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Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
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A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.
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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.
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Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.
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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?
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Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.
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The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.
George Will
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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.
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The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
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They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
George Will
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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.
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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
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Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.
George Will
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Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.
George Will
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Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.
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I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
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Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
George Will