Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one.

— George Will

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.

— George Will

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

— George Will

I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.

— George Will

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.

— George Will

...it is impossible to reason people out of affiliations they have not been reasoned into.

— George Will

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

— George Will

Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.

— George Will

The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.

— George Will

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

— George Will