Quote

Once when the Yankee's Lou Pinella was batting he questioned a Palermo strike call. Pinella demanded, Where was that pitch at? Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Pinella, no dummy, said, OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?

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
Front
Yankees
Prepositions
Told
Pitch
Yankee
Call
Strike
Dummy
Ends
Sentence
Batting
Men
Wearing
Questioned
People
Strikes
Asshole
Sentences
Umpires
Fronts
Demanded

More quotes by George Will

Image
Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
George Will
Image
There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambience in public spaces. Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing. It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion.
George Will
Image
The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.
George Will
Image
The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
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
Image
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.
George Will
Image
Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
George Will
Image
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
George Will
Image
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.
George Will
Image
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
Image
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.
George Will
Image
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
George Will
Image
All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.
George Will
Image
Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It's what they do. It's a metabolic urge. That's all they've done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office.
George Will
Image
In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.
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