George Will

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

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.

Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

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tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

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!'

One radical free spirit nonconformist is pretty much like another.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

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 euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

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

The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.

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.

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.

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

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.

America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

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

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.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

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

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M.

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

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense - being in the country illegally - a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction.

The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom of information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can but enjoys no superior right of access.

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.

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

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

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word "sacrifice" means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

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

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents - judges' decisions - rather than statutes, baseball's codes are the game's distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

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

Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

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.

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.

Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.

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!"

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible "lifestyles" turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

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

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

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.

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

Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.

Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.

Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word 'sacrifice' means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

Big government is indeed big, and like another big creature, the sauropod dinosaur, government has a primitive nervous system: The fact of an injury to the tail could take nearly a minute to be communicated to the sauropod brain.

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.

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

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

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

The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

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.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

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.