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Libertarian presidential candidate André Marrou's idea is that government power is opposed to individual liberty. Must we still debate such sophomoric notions?... Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value.

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
Important
Idea
Libertarian
Individual
Presidential
Andr
Stills
Debate
Notions
Power
Although
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Still
Notion
Besides
Government
Value
Individuality
Ideas
Liberty
Opposed
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Candidates

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All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.
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The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.
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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.
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I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.
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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.
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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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Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.
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Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.
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Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor.
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Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
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Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard.
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Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.
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Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking - a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.
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The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying.
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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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Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
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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.
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Remarkably, [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was reading her statement. So her mare's-nest of inapposite words and unclear thoughts cannot be excused as symptoms of Biden's Disease, that form of logorrhea that causes victims, such as Sen. Joe Biden, to become lost on the syntactical back roads of their extemporaneous rhetoric.
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On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life's incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.
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Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: I don't have to draw you a picture a hint will do.
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