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?
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
Peace will come With tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire But will bring us no reward when her false idols fall.
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
We can only give away to others what we have inside ourselves.
But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.
But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
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