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?
It's not just a matter of whether you support Obama or Romney. It's who they have coming with them. I always keep my powder dry, as they say in the military.
Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?
The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.
So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.
The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.
We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.
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