Quotes by George Will

About George Will:

George Frederick Will is an American newspaper columnist and political commentator. He is a Pulitzer Prize–winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America," in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.

George Will

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes becau...

George Will

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

George Will

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

George Will

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

George Will

Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking - a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on...

George Will

There is no 'European people' united by common mores.

George Will

When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

George Will

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, ...

George Will

Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease.

George Will

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.

George Will

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

George Will

Political ignorance helps explain Americans' perpetual disappointment with politicians generally, and presidents especially, to whom voters unrealistically attribute abilities to control events.

George Will

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

George Will

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.

George Will

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

George Will

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 theref...

George Will

The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.

George Will

...it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.

George Will

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

George Will

If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.

George Will

Author Bio

  • NameGeorge Will
  • DescriptionAmerican newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
  • BornMay 4, 1941
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist