110+ George Will Quotes On Baseball, Analytical And Insightful

George Will was an American journalist and political commentator who wrote for the Washington Post. He was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in hundreds of newspapers. He was also a television commentator who appeared on Fox News, ABC, and MSNBC. Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Will on baseball, analytical, insightful.

Top 10 George Will Quotes

1. Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
2. Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
3. The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
4. Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
5. The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny "arf" - the sound of a lap dog.
6. 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.
7. The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
8. Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.
9. We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
10. Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.

George Will Short Quotes

• Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.
• Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
• Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
• The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
• Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
• The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.
• Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.
• Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
• As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
• It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.

George Will Quotes About Baseball

Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial. — George Will

It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression. — George Will

All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header. — George Will

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

They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans. — George Will

Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals. — George Will

Baseball's rich in wonderful statistics, but it's hard to find one more beautiful than Stan Musial's hitting record. He didn't care where he was, he just hit. — George Will

Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said? — George Will

Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched. — George Will

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community. — George Will

George Will Quotes About Politics

The cost of appearing with a bloviating ignoramus is obvious, it seems to me. Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics. — George Will

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point. — George Will

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions. — George Will

The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint. — George Will

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. — George Will

I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have. — George Will

For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. — George Will

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

So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton's understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of 'vote' is. — George Will

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. — George Will

George Will Quotes About Ethics

I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life. — George Will

Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be? — George Will

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

George Will Quotes About Drug

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes — George Will

There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization. — George Will

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

George Will Quotes About World

Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio. — George Will

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

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

Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire. — George Will

It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country - and indeed the world - has yet seen. — George Will

Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson - one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job - about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies. — George Will

On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it's runny. — George Will

George Will Famous Quotes And Sayings

I hear Democrats say, 'The Affordable Care Act is the law,' as though we're supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them. — George Will

Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn't matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he's fine. If it doesn't work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won't matter. — George Will

I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative. — George Will

Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, 'What you are doing is none of my business' and 'What I am doing is none of your business.' — George Will

Taking offense has become America's national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them. — 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

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

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. — 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, its causes, timing and scope are known. — George Will

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. — George Will

The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them. — George Will

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

The First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'. — George Will

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

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. — George Will

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

We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous. — George Will

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings. — George Will

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism. — George Will

Pessimism is as American as apple pie. Frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese. — George Will

Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness. — George Will

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

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

Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese. — George Will

The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children — George Will

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it. — George Will

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is. — George Will

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. — George Will

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice. — George Will

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within. — George Will

Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early. — George Will

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 knowledge — George Will

Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor. — George Will

One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another. — George Will

Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it. — George Will

It was over in a blink of an eye, that moment when aviation stirred the modern imagination. Aviation was transformed from recklessness to routine in Lindbergh's lifetime. Today the riskiest part of air travel is the drive to the airport, and the airlines use a barrage of stimuli to protect passengers from ennui. — George Will

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good. — George Will

Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It's what they do. It's a metabolic urge. That's all they've done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office. — 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 therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything. — George Will

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order. — George Will

Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness. — 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

I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights. — George Will

For as long as I can remember the slogan has been ... the federal government ought to behave more like families, because families balance their budgets. It turns out that families looked around and said, "You know what? Let's behave more like the government!" — George Will

America overflows with specious "victims" demanding redress for spurious grievances. However, one genuinely oppressed minority is getting overdue relief. Beginning with spring training in Arizona and Florida, Major League Baseball, taking pity on traumatized pitchers, is directing umpires to enforce the strike zone. — George Will

Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout "Bang!" — George Will

Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard. — George Will

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. — George Will

As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us', using, among other dark arts, advertising. — George Will

All politicians are to some extent salesmen. — George Will

The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory. — George Will

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. — George Will

Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights. — George Will

Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue. — George Will

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments. — George Will

The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication. — George Will

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. — George Will

The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money -- the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity. — George Will

All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority. — George Will

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. — George Will

The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people's money. — George Will

The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government's size is at any moment, is the bare minimum neccessary to forestall intolerable suffering. — George Will

Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly. — George Will

Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making. — George Will

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal. — George Will

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly. — George Will

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. — George Will

The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty. — George Will

Life Lessons by George Will

1. George Will's life lessons emphasize the importance of hard work, dedication, and perseverance. He believed that success comes from dedication and hard work, and that one should never give up on their dreams.
2. He also believed that it is important to stay informed and to be an engaged and active citizen in order to make the world a better place.
3. Finally, he believed that it is important to be open-minded and to consider different perspectives in order to make sound decisions.