Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
Interpretation
Overreaching reflects a quintessentially American trait of striving for more, embodying both ambition and excess.
In this quote, George Will suggests that the American spirit is characterized by a tendency to reach beyond conventional limits, highlighting that this overreaching can be seen as both admirable and a part of the nation's identity. It speaks to the notion that ambition and the desire for progress, even when it leads to excess, are inherent to American culture and values.
In practice
During a presentation on American values, one might quote Will to emphasize the importance of ambition in U.S. culture.
The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.
The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
When I was four I joined a group of girls who were talking about their party dresses. I thought they were imagining, so I imagined a fantastic pink velvet dress with lots of jewels. But they were simply describing what they actually wore, and they had utter contempt for my obvious fiction. After that, I never joined a group again.
My future is in my past and my past is my present. I must now make the present my future.
In spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
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