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Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.
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
Without
People
Pettiness
Purposes
Tendency
Tendencies
Large
Purpose
More quotes by George Will
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.
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Sports is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things - courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship.
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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
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It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.
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There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
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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.
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Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
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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.
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The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
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Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
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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.
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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.
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Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
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Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.
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On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it's runny.
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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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The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
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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 English language is not always the President's friend.
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