George Will Political Quotations

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

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

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

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

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 favored, and grateful, corporations.

The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

Committed partisans are generally the most knowledgeable voters, independents the least. And the more political knowledge people have, the more apt they are to discuss politics with people who agree with, and reinforce, them.

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

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.

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.

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.

As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.

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

Term limits would make Congress bolder, more independent, and less risk-averse.

The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity - the political allocation of wealth and opportunity - is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

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.

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.