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
war achievement world
We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.
memories challenges growth
The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.
men world language
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
noise culture gregariousness
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
intellectual age chess
There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.
incessant signals
Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.
dream song infidelity
Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.
art drama forever
The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
rewards students chairs
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
player ego crumbling
Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the 'ego of the other player crumbling.'
significance translate decipher
To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.
risk understanding constrain
To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding
frustration ties one-day
It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.
teacher careers age
Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.