"Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly."
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Quote collection
George Will quotes (page 9 of 13)
250 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes."
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"Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it."
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"Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched."
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"The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work."
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"It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism."
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"The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product."
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"There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambience in public spaces. Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing. It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion."
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"Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage."
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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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"Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense - being in the country illegally - a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction."
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"The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible."
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"If there were 10,000 U.S. forces ashore [in Lebanon], authorized to move about, there would be less risk to American lives than there is with an immobile force of 1,300."
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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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"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."
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"The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers."
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"Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain."
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"Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences."
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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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"Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals."
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