All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
Interpretation
Politics often involves navigating complex and tricky situations, and our judgments are often conditional.
George Will suggests that in the realm of politics, many decisions and actions are not absolute but rather conditional, highlighting the complexity and nuances that characterize political discourse. The phrase 'up to a point' emphasizes that there are limits and qualifications to any political argument or stance, reminding us that understanding politics requires careful consideration of context and boundaries.
In practice
During a political debate, one might cite this quote to illustrate the complexities of policy decisions.
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?
Virtually all informed observers agree that a fair and equitable resolution of the plight of the Palestinians would considerably weaken the anger and hatred of Israel and the US in the Arab and Muslim worlds - and far beyond, as international polls reveal. Such an agreement is surely within reach, if the US and Israel depart from their long-standing rejectionism.
Could you imagine if the U.N. had endorsed the war in Iraq, what our reputation would be like?
A political problem thought of in military terms eventually becomes a military problem.
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.
The Kennedy Administration's public pronouncements on the matter suggested that the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Castro's Cuba would represent an unacceptable strategic threat to the United States. . . . This urgent transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base - by the presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass-destruction - constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. . . .
A people cannot long retain their freedom, whose government is incapable of protecting them.
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