George F. Will

“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.”

“He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.”

“Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.”

“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.”

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

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

“Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.”

“There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.”

“Politics is always driven by competing worries.”

“The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.”

“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.”

“Enough anecdotes make a pattern.”

“if we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.”

“There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.”

“In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon”

“Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.”

“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.”

“In this age of 'whatever,' Americans are becoming slaves to the new tyranny of nonchalance. " James Morris”

“People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.”

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