George F. Will Quotes

Progressives think progress depends upon (that is, they sometimes define progress as) the concentration of power as high as possible in government’s regulatory apparatus.

I believe that government is too large, costs too much, spends too much, and has too much regulatory power in our lives.

Government, not the oil industry, is the biggest 'profiteer' from oil. And it uses the tax revenue to expand its own authority at the expense of the individual, as it does with an endless number of other industries - including electric power, coal, lumber, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, aircraft, and agriculture. The Statist's intrusion to the free market is boundless.

You've got the Democratic Party that now depends on more government spending and actual building the dependence on government in order to increase their political party.

I don't believe we need any more taxes. We need to curtail the size of government. That seems to be a common thread among a majority of Americans out there that understand that we have to limit the size and scope of our government.

If you want the government off your back, get your hands out of its pockets.

Once you put yourself in the hands of the government, you could end up in Utah.

Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded.

Government works less efficiently when it begins to grow out of control and takes on more and more of the responsibilities that belong to the citizens.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.

We don't know what our health care costs are going to be. We don't know what our tax rates are going to be. We don't know what our interest rates are going to be. We don't know what our energy costs are going to be. All these uncertainties are being driven by the Government's agenda. What we really need to do is get Government to step back.

In the case of the Democrats' 2009 budget request, the statement of need could not have been articulated any clearer: We need more spending, historic new tax hikes, and greater control over the way American families live their lives.

The demand that school finances be transferred away from local school districts to the state and/or federal government has been a long-time favorite of the educationist lobbies.

We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.

If you are the mayor of a city, one of the things you do is to try and gouge as much money out of the Federal Government as you can. That is your job.

The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.

All of you, I am sure, have heard many cries about Government interference with business and about "creeping socialism." I should like to remind the gentlemen who make these complaints that if events had been allowed to continue as they were going prior to March 4, 1933, most of them would have no businesses left for the Government or for anyone else to interfere with — and almost surely we would have socialism in this country, real socialism.

Too much of power has got concentrated in the hands of the Central and state governments.

Let me tell you, that's what taxation is - it's confiscation. It's your money, it's not the government's money. But the government makes you think that it all comes from them.

Those who want to "spread the wealth" almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?

What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the state powers into the hands of the general government.

Along this road of spending, the government either takes over, which is Socialism, or dictates institutional and economic life, which is Fascism.

Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.