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It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

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
Failures
Failure
Proliferate
Axiomatic
Penalty
Penalties

More quotes by George Will

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Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?
George Will
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I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, 'cause he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity that, although he got 270 electoral votes and therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything.
George Will
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A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
George Will
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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.
George Will
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Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
George Will
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The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
George Will
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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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I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
George Will
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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
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The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children
George Will
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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
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Mitt Romney's losing at this point in a big way. If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why - given that Mr. Romney knew the day that [Sen. John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again - that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest.
George Will
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When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.
George Will
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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.
George Will
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Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment.
George Will
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The reformers' preferred metaphor is leveling the playing field. They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.
George Will
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I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.
George Will
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The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.
George Will
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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.
George Will
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Even the continents drift.
George Will