George Will
George Will
George Frederick Willis an American newspaper columnist and political commentator. He is a Pulitzer Prize–winner known for his conservative commentary on politics. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America," in a league with Walter Lippmann...
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth4 May 1941
long style alive
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
suicide civilization hatred
It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.
jealousy sports war
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
together-again mind pieces
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
alcohol doubt saint
No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.
birthday lying issues
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
power self deception
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
truth lying believe
The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.
life happiness truth
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
views age world
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
pain effort special
He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.
war fighting soldier
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.
faith believe reality
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
time writing political-language
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.