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?
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").
What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.
Kindness is produced by kindness.
I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
The American birthright belongs, potentially, to everyone. This is unprecedented. Other countries accept migrants on the basis of economic necessity or as a humanitarian gesture. Only in America is it the direct consequence of our foundational ideals.
Live and allow others to live; hurt no one; life is dear to all living beings.
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