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Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

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
Modern
Empire
Revisiting
Choices
Empires
Bracing
Free
Revolutionary
Defying
War
Shape
Remarkably
World
Turned
Reminder
Shapes
Reminders
Fate
Continent
Americans
Continents

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Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
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Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.
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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.'
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All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
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Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.
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Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.
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Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense - being in the country illegally - a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction.
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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.
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[A] re-elected McConnell, with a Republican majority, would, he says, emulate his model of majority leadership - the 16 years under a Democrat, Montana'€™s Mike Mansfield. He, like McConnell, had a low emotional metabolism but a subtle sense of the Senate's singular role in the nation's constitutional equilibrium.
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The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
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Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.
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Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
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