The Conservative Sensibility Quotes

“it is arguable that the most molecular word in political discourse, the noun that denotes something on which all else depends and builds, is neither “justice” nor “freedom” nor “equality.” It is “family.” Without the nurturing and disciplining done in intact families, individuals are apt to be ill-equipped to exercise the freedom to become unequal, and therefore are handicapped in the pursuit of justice for themselves and others.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“[Americans] correctly believe that its political arrangements are universal truths, and the understanding of the human condition that those arrangements reflect are superior to other nations’ arrangements.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“We have come a long way from sod huts and muddy boots to an economy that produces billions of dollars’ worth of soap. And we may be learning what Mark Twain meant: “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Progressives still express their worries in an essentially 1930s vocabulary of distributive justice, understood in economic, meaning material, terms. This assumes a reassuringly mundane politics of splittable differences—how much concrete to pour, how many crops to subsidize by how much, which factions shall get what.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“This book is, among other things, a summons to pessimism. What is needed now, and what it is especially incumbent on conservatives to provide, is intelligent pessimism that is more than a mere mood. It should be a mentality grounded in a philosophic tradition that has a distinguished pedigree, and that is validated by abundant historical evidence for this proposition: Nothing lasts.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“To take from one, because it is thought that his industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry or skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.”87 With his phrase “the first principle of association” Jefferson, who had a bust of Locke at Monticello, was harkening back to Locke’s reasoning from the state of nature: This is why we come together in political association in the first place. All men are created equal as rational pursuers of happiness as they define it, and are equally entitled to the enjoyment of the fruits of their striving. Lincoln thought that economic inequality could and should be a spur to industry: “That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.” And in the next sentence of his March 21, 1864, letter to the Workingmen’s Association he implicitly cautioned against what today is known as redistribution: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”88”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Some people who fancy themselves intellectually emancipated—who think themselves liberated from what they call a stultifying cultural inheritance—actually reside in what G. K. Chesterton called “the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“The object of government,” wrote Madison in Federalist 62, is “the happiness of the people.”29 He and his fellow Founders conceived of happiness as Aristotle did, as a durable state of worthy satisfaction with life. To be worthy, satisfaction must flow from the vigorous employment of the faculties that make us human: individual reasoning and social participation. Happiness, therefore, is an activity.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“A rights-centered society, must, however, take seriously the fact that duties are not natural. They must be taught. Self-interest is common and steady; virtue is rare and unpredictable. A society devoted to guaranteeing a broad scope for self-interested behavior must be leavened by virtue. So measures must be taken to make virtue less rare and more predictable. Among those measures, Americans have always considered education crucial.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Education has been assigned a large and, it seems, ever expanding role in maintaining social equilibrium by buttressing self-control. And in fertilizing the soil of patriotism, which presupposes a purpose beyond, a purpose sometimes higher than, that of the individual. So, patriotism involves transcending, or circumscribing, the value of individual autonomy.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Time was, in places like rural Mississippi, African-Americans lived in stable, traditional, organic communities of a sort often admired by intellectuals who praised them from far away. African-Americans led lives of poverty, disease, and oppression, experiencing the grim security of peonage. Then came machines that picked cotton more efficiently than stooped-over people could, so lots of African-Americans stood up, packed up, got on the Illinois Central, got off at Chicago’s Twelfth Street station, and went to the vibrant South Side where life was not a day at the beach but was better than rural Mississippi. Destruction of a “way of life” by “impersonal” economic forces can be a fine thing.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“At this point, the Grumpy Economist becomes the Incredulous Economist: “If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“John Cochrane notes: “Rich people mostly give away or reinvest their wealth. It’s hard to see just how this is a problem.…Look at Versailles. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, lives like Marie Antoinette. And nobody in the US lives like her peasants.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“What the economist and historian Deirdre N. McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment began in seventeenth-century Holland, gathered steam—literally—in eighteenth-century Britain and the American colonies. Although agriculture was invented about 11,000 years ago, it took 4,000 years for it to supplant hunting and gathering as mankind’s main source of food. This made possible the rise of cities, which involved transactions that led to the development of writing about 5,000 years ago and mathematics about 4,000 years ago. But modernity means velocity. It took 4,000 years for mankind to adapt harnesses to the long necks of horses. But just sixty-six years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, which covered a distance shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747, a man walked on the moon.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Progressives celebrated Holmes’ assertion that government should be able to exercise almost untrammeled police powers as long as government asserts what would come to be called a “rational basis” for exercises of this power. And a mere assertion should suffice.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“In another dissent, which became famous and influential, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted an almost unlimited government police power flowing from “the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.” Notice that Holmes’ majoritarianism led him to assert an essentially unlimited right.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“The permutations of rent-seeking are as many as the administrative state is vast. Rent-seeking is the activity of attempting to increase one’s income without increasing the quantity or quality of the goods or services offered to customers. It is the attempt to manipulate public power for private advantage—to get government to improve your economic circumstances by conferring a benefit on you or a handicap on your competitors.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“The legislative branch writes laws, the head of the executive branch takes care that the laws are faithfully executed, at which point the judiciary is perpetually poised to scrutinize the content and application of the laws. Which makes the judiciary the epicenter of constitutional government.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom on the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Limits to the wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.” Note well: the community’s right is “absolute.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“But when democracy, meaning the process of majority rule, is the supreme value—when it is elevated to the status of what the Constitution is “basically about”—the individual is again at the mercy of the strong: the strength of mere numbers. Sandefur says progressivism “inverts America’s constitutional foundations” by holding that the Constitution is “about” democracy, which rejects the Framers’ premise that majority rule is legitimate “only within the boundaries” of the individual’s natural rights.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“identity politics is valid, then the idea that education should make the educated a member of a larger intellectual culture is invalid. If the premise of identity politics is true, then the idea on which America rests is false. If the premise of identity politics is true, then there is in no meaningful sense a universal human nature, and there are no general standards of intellectual discourse, and no ethic of ennobling disputation, no process of civil persuasion toward friendly consent, no source of legitimacy other than power, and we all live immersed in our tribes, warily watching other tribes across the chasms of our “differences.” No sensible person wants to live in such a society.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“America was born with an epistemological assertion: The important political truths are not merely knowable, they are known. They are self-evident in that they are obvious to any mind not clouded by ignorance or superstition. It is, the Declaration says, self-evidently true that “all men are created equal” not only in their access to the important political truths, but also in being endowed with certain unalienable rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps the most important word in the Declaration is the word “secure”: “[T]o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” Government’s primary purpose is to secure pre-existing rights. Government does not create rights; it does not dispense them.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“24 If so, the more resources that are invested in education, the more stratified society will become. If education is going to create and widen disparities between citizens, it must take care to inculcate some commonalities. Otherwise, links of shared values and understandings will become dangerously attenuated.”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

“Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page. And when the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race.”65”
― George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility