George Will
Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.Collection: Mean
The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.Collection: Dream
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?"Collection: Men
When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things; the debate is raging; and he's losing it.Collection: Two
Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.Collection: Passion
For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.Collection: Believe
The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our childrenCollection: Children
All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.Collection: Baseball
Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.Collection: Distance
The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.Collection: Fields
Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.Collection: People
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.Collection: Inspirational
The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.Collection: School
Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.Collection: Leadership
As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.Collection: Political
Even the continents drift.Collection: Continents
Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.Collection: Talking
The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.Collection: Agency
The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.Collection: Empires
What is really shocking in America isn't what's done in and by Washington that is illegal by that what is done in and by Washington that's legal.Collection: America
The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.Collection: Funny
Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.Collection: Government
On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life's incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.Collection: Cheerful
What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.Collection: Government
The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.Collection: People
Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard. His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man comfortable with complexity. The protracted consideration of Keystone supposedly displayed these virtues. Now, however, it is clear that his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster.Collection: Thoughtful
We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledgeCollection: Knowledge
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.Collection: Television
Libertarian presidential candidate André Marrou's idea is that "government power is opposed to individual liberty." Must we still debate such sophomoric notions?... Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value.Collection: Government
Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.Collection: People
The Revolution's most important result was Napoleon, whose most important result (as France learned in 1871, and again in 1914, and again in 1940) was the invention of GermanyCollection: Important
Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.Collection: Men
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.Collection: Sports
Overcriminalization has become a national plague.Collection: Plague
[President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches; listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year.Collection: Years
Let's note, that in what I consider the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime - something not exampled since Jane Fonda sat on the anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to be photographed - Mr. McDermott said in effect, not in effect, he said it, we should take Saddam Hussein at his word and not take the President at his word. He said the United States is simply trying to provoke. I mean, why Saddam Hussein doesn't pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know.Collection: Mean
Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.Collection: Philosophy
The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.Collection: Past
Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition.Collection: Sports
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.Collection: Disappointment
Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.Collection: Bed
Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals.Collection: Sports
Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.Collection: Want
[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.Collection: Emotional
Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate. ” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.Collection: Jobs
The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying.Collection: Important
Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.Collection: Writing
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.Collection: Wise
One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.Collection: Free Spirit