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

More quotes by 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
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
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.
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
Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor.
George Will
Image
It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.
George Will
Image
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
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
All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.
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
Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
George Will
Image
Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.
George Will
Image
Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
George Will
Image
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things the debate is raging and he's losing it.
George Will
Image
The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
George Will
Image
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
George Will
Image
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
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