Quote

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

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
Listen
Leveling
Playing
Leveled
Language
Reformers
Preferred
Metaphor
Logic
Field
Fields
Bulldozers

More quotes by George Will

Image
It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.
George Will
Image
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
Image
As Aristotle said, happiness is not a condition that is produced or stands on its own rather, it is a frame of mind that accompanies an activity. But another frame of mind comes first. It is a steely determination to do well.
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
The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
George Will
Image
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
George Will
Image
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.
George Will
Image
One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.
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
Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.
George Will
Image
Republicans define freedom as an absence of restraints imposed by government. Democrats define freedom as an absence of necessity, which government exists to reduce. America has not moved as far as it thinks it has beyond the argument about the New Deal, when FDR insisted, Necessitous men are not free men.
George Will
Image
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
George Will
Image
Once when the Yankee's Lou Pinella was batting he questioned a Palermo strike call. Pinella demanded, Where was that pitch at? Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Pinella, no dummy, said, OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?
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
Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.
George Will
Image
As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.
George Will
Image
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
George Will
Image
It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
George Will
Image
She is so totally absorbed in a vocation - both a gift and a mastering passion - that she has no time to be absorbed with the self's worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.
George Will
Image
I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.
George Will