Quote

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.

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
Learn
Inevitable
Government
Tongue
Semantics
Keys
Tongues
Early
Lest
Strange
Sarcasm
Public
Sarcastic
Creative
Consists
Talking
Contemporary

More quotes by George Will

Image
The cost of appearing with a bloviating ignoramus is obvious, it seems to me. Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.
George Will
Image
Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
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
Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
George Will
Image
It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
George Will
Image
So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton's understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of 'vote' is.
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
Image
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
George Will
Image
Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
George Will
Image
I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.
George Will
Image
It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.
George Will
Image
We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.
George Will
Image
Even the continents drift.
George Will
Image
National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
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
The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.
George Will
Image
[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.
George Will