George F. Will Quotes

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

If anyone tells you that you cannot legislate morality, remeber that legislation IS morality.

The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis for all legislation.

People must live with the laws that we make.

You must legislate morality.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction.

Law principally and properly seeks the common good. Planning for the common good is the task of the whole people or of someone ruling in the person of the whole people. Thus lawmaking is the task of the whole charge of the whole people; for in all other matters direction toward an end is the function of him to whom the end belongs.

Let us give our Republic not the best possible laws but the best which they will bear.

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It's inescapable.

You can't legislate morality.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

I have always maintained that society has no business dictating morality.

Republican government loses half its value where the moral and social duties are ... negligently practiced.

Against human nature one cannot legislate.

Since the state is a community of human beings it is as truly subject to the moral law as any private society.

What the lawmaker has to ascertain is not the true belief but the common belief.

[America] is so awash in rights that we are virtually unable to pass legislation reflecting traditional religious and moral views. Moral relativism will then be the rule, at law; and what is true at law will shape what is practiced.

It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

If the vision of the world in its integrity is lost, the field of legal regulation becomes reduced to the cases of the visible damage done, and the boundaries of the latter become more narrow with the erosion of public morality and secularization of consciousness

Men in their private capacities may be allowed to prefer their single profit, but should consult only the general good in public councils.