Quote

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

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
Constant
Community
American
Exemplifies
Mind
Individualism
Yearning
Tension
Pull
Baseball

More quotes by George Will

Image
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
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
Mitt Romney's losing at this point in a big way. If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why - given that Mr. Romney knew the day that [Sen. John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again - that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest.
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
When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.
George Will
Image
The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.
George Will
Image
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
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
Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.
George Will
Image
Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.
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
Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
George Will
Image
The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.
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
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
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
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
George Will
Image
When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees? No, the book they turned into a bestseller is titled What's the Matter With Kansas? Notice a pattern here?
George Will