The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: George F. Will

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette’s syndrome: “Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,’I have a body.’ There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

disability, fallen-world, identity

Author complains about “the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

and-mesia, collective-memory, culture, history

Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.

culture, personality, policy

Gifted teachers master the patience required for the unending business of transmitting civilization down the generations, transforming biological facts – children – into social artifacts called citizens. It is wearying work and it is a wonder teachers can summon the stamina for it.

culture, education, teaching

From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.

character, culture

A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.

continuity, culture, moderation

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

anxiety, civil-fabric, compromise, culture

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

culture, narrative, storytelling

Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.

culture, elitism, pride

In Gladstone’s mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.

church-and-state, culture

The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.

narcissism, self-centeredness, self-esteem