Quote

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

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
Best
Inoculation
Disappointments
Hence
Disappointment
Radical
Expectations
Use
History

More quotes by George Will

Image
Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment.
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
Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.
George Will
Image
Money is time made tangible - the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner's time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom.
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
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
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
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
George Will
Image
The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.
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 unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf - the sound of a lap dog.
George Will
Image
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.
George Will
Image
Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
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
I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
George Will
Image
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
Image
[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.
George Will
Image
It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.
George Will