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Twenty minutes into his presidency, Donald Trump, who is always claiming to have made, or to be about to make, astonishing history, had done so. Living down to expectations, he had delivered the most dreadful inaugural address in history.

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
History
Address
Done
Presidency
Made
Twenty
Make
Donald
Inaugural
Always
Expectations
Claiming
Minutes
Delivered
Trump
Dreadful
Living
Astonishing

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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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They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
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Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.
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Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.
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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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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.
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In the annals of American blunders, the Bay of Pigs may have been even more feckless, and the invasion of Iraq more costly, but we cannot yet calculate the cost of teaching Iran and others, by our role in the casual overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, the peril of not having nuclear weapons.
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Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will
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The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.
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As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
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Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
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Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
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Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.
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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.
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Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.
George Will
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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.
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Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
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Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?
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Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.
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When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things the debate is raging and he's losing it.
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