The strongest continuous thread in America’s political tradition is skepticism about government.
The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child’s program of subverting authority.
National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.
Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.
Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.
Nationalism is blamed for this century’s wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.
Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.
When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville.
Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.
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.
Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments. – Frederick the Great.
The utter absence of proof for a proposition is proof of a successful conspiracy to destroy all proof.
Politics is always driven by competing worries.
There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.
The argument that a particular project will be “self-financing” is usually the first refuge of politicians defending the indefensible.
Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.
Speaking for George Will, on whose thinking I am world’s foremost authority, I say: not necessarily. The heavy hitters do have heavy responsibilities.