George Will once said something like: "There are things that are 
perfectly true yet which we cannot say."  What was the actual
quote and where did it appear?

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Request for Question Clarification by nancylynn-ga on 14 Dec 2003 13:27 PST

Hello bugbear-ga:

Could you tell me where you happened to stumble upon that quote? Do
you know if Will made that statement during a TV appearance, or if he
wrote it in his column?

Could you possibly give me a general time frame for when Will wrote
that sentence? Or, do you have any idea what the quote was in
reference to?

Any little clues may help!

Thanks,
nancylynn-ga

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Clarification of Question by bugbear-ga on 15 Dec 2003 06:07 PST

I saw it in writing, probably broken out as a quote in something
written by someone else, and probably in the past 5 to 10 years.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 16 Dec 2003 19:21 PST

George Will once quoted Lenin using a somewhat similar phrase:

-----
One of Lenin's colleagues recalled arguing with Lenin about a
particularly indiscriminate police measure authorizing executions
without trials of categories of people defined no more precisely than
"hooligans" or "speculators" or "counterrevolutionary agitators." The
colleague wrote:

"So I called out in exasperation, "Then why do we bother with a
Commissariat for Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for
Social Extermination and be done with it!" Lenin's face suddenly
brightened and he replied, "Well put . . . that's exactly what it
should be . . . but we can't say that'."
-----

I don't suppose that's what you're looking for, though.

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Clarification of Question by bugbear-ga on 17 Dec 2003 13:55 PST

No, that's not what I was looking for, though amusing.  I suppose
one thing that makes this hard is that there are so many places
Will might have said it.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 18 Dec 2003 18:13 PST

Here's something on topic, though it doesn't seem quite what you're looking for:

"When the history of today's liberalism is written, the writers may .
. . tread lightly. Otherwise they may be sued by liberals demanding
subordination of the historians' rights of freedom of expression to
some greater social good that supposedly would be impaired unless the
historians' speech is regulated.

You say it can't happen here? Notice what already is happening."

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Clarification of Question by bugbear-ga on 18 Dec 2003 19:30 PST

Alas no, that's not it.  The quote I'm looking for is pretty
much verbatim as I gave it.  Maybe there was no "perfectly",
maybe "yet" was "and", but probably no differences bigger than
that.  --pg

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 20 Dec 2003 16:00 PST

Bugbear,

This is beginning to really BUG me, and I can't BEAR it, so I'm asking
for...anything!

Do you remember any other details...even the smallest thing.  Who
wrote the article?  What type of publication?  What topic?  What did
you have for lunch that day?

And...are you sure the quote was attributed to George Will, as opposed
to some other writer/commentator of similar ilk?

Any additional tidbits of info would be most appreciated....and may help!

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Clarification of Question by bugbear-ga on 20 Dec 2003 19:35 PST

I think I read it as a quote in something someone else wrote.
It may have been in someone's sig file.  I'm pretty sure of
both the wording and the attribution to George Will.  And it
was probably in the last 10 years.

bugbear --

George Will's best-known discussion of his fundamental view of "truth"
may be his commencement speech at the College of William and Mary on
May 15, 1994. Here is a representative quote:

"The [Nietzschean] ideas [that are at the root of postmodernism and
identity politics] are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our
civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts
accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our
perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity,
sex or class. Once that foundation of realism is denied, the
foundation of society based on persuasion crumbles."

Here is a link to the text of that speech:
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/george-will/george-will.html


Will's essential position is that truth can be determined through reason:

"The postmodernists' bowdlerizing of Nietzsche distills to a simple,
and simple-minded, assertion. It is that because the acquisition of
knowledge is not a simple process of infallible immediacy, there can
be no knowledge in any meaningful sense. Therefore, we are utterly
emancipated from rules of reasoning and may substitute willfulness for
rationality."


Unfortunately, there is nothing in the speech that is reminiscent of
the precise language you remember, and it is not even clear whether
his argument here is consistent with the substance of the quote you
remember seeing.

markj-ga

This is interesting, but the quote probably wasn't from 
this speech.  My guess is that he is talking about 
political correctness.