George F. Will Quotes

Yes, violence begets more violence, but historically this has been the way of the world.

The thing about war is that once it's triggered, it is unyielding in its appetite. And the more it consumes and gorges, the more it wants.

Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.

War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.

President George Bush declared a National Day of Prayer for Peace. This was after he had carefully arranged and started the war.

There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is far worse or much harder to win.

Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.

However and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, as we like to say of things we do not fully understand, 'a life of its own.

The closer one gets to elections or wars, the further one gets from the truth.

[D]rawing up 'secret war plans' for a possible attack on Iraq wasn't irrational. The low-level war against Saddam was 12 years old, with no end in sight. American and British pilots were getting shot at, sanctions weren't working, and Bush was getting warnings that Saddam had all those terrible weapons and would use them against America. Bush would have been a fool not to draw up plans. Gee, wait till the critics find out that FDR, without ever informing the media, was plotting to fight Japan and Germany before Pearl Harbor.

If someone says, "Katie, you are out of order," over something I've said, or, "Katie, you are wrong," if I defend myself or justify myself, then I have just started the war.

During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 2100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either.

When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

The sad truth is that you can have peace processes all you like, but if one side is committed to war, then it's war.

If someone puts up the argument that King Louis gave the Romagna to Pope Alexander, and the kingdom of Naples to Spain, in order to avoid a war, I would answer as I did before: that you should never let things get out of hand in order to avoid war. You don't avoid such a war, you merely postpone it, to your own disadvantage.

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

They say, "Katie, you're wrong." And if I say, "How dare you say that? I have studied and studied." Or, "I am an expert in" whatever area we're talking about. Or, "No, you are wrong! And I think you're rude!" Or anything like that, and if we don't say it out loud, maybe we think it, but that's stressful. The moment I've defended, in any way, I've started the war.

This is it. It's for all the marbles. I'm sitting in the house loading up the pump, I'm loading up the Uzis, I've got a couple of M-16s, couple of nines, couple of joints with some silencers on them, couple of grenades, got a missile launcher. I'm ready for war.

No president can easily commit our sons and daughters to war.

[D]rilling and arming, when carried on on a national scale, excite whole populations to frenzies which end in war.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

The conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed.

Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos. We, however, live in the firm conviction our times will see not the decline but the renaissance of the West. It is our proud hope and our unshakable belief Germany can make an imperishable contribution to this great work.