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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.

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
System
Complexes
Suburban
Law
Complex
Spontaneously
Society
Capitalism
Lawns
Rather
Market
Functioning
Free
Program
Springs
Doe
Laws
Properly
Government
Spring
Libertarian
Creation
Soil
Mores

More quotes by George Will

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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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Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.
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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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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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If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration - and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration - is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.
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In September 1942 the U.S. government purchased 58,575 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee. Soon there was a town, Oak Ridge, and amazing scientific facilities. Thirty-four months after the purchase, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. After 43 months in Iraq, U.S. forces still struggle to cope with improvised explosive devices.
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Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.
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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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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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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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Sports is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things - courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship.
George Will
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America overflows with specious victims demanding redress for spurious grievances. However, one genuinely oppressed minority is getting overdue relief. Beginning with spring training in Arizona and Florida, Major League Baseball, taking pity on traumatized pitchers, is directing umpires to enforce the strike zone.
George Will
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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 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
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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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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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Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
George Will
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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.
George Will
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All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
George Will
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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