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Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, 'What you are doing is none of my business' and 'What I am doing is none of your business.'

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
Willingness
Requires
None
Civilization
Depends
Often
Business
Life
Civility

More quotes by George Will

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Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.
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As Aristotle said, happiness is not a condition that is produced or stands on its own rather, it is a frame of mind that accompanies an activity. But another frame of mind comes first. It is a steely determination to do well.
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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.
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The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.
George Will
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Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
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The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children
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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.
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[President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year.
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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.
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It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.
George Will
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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.
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The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government's size is at any moment, is the bare minimum neccessary to forestall intolerable suffering.
George Will
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As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
George Will
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National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
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Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
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The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
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.
George Will
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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
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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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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.
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