Daily Inspiration Quote by George Will

Perfection is the kind of virtue that can quietly turn into sabotage, and George Will’s line lands because it treats that flip as a predictable human error, not a melodrama. As a journalist steeped in politics, sports, and the rhythms of argument, Will is pointing at a familiar pathology in public life: the demand for immaculate solutions becomes an all-purpose excuse to do nothing, or to keep purity-policing until the moment passes.

The intent is corrective, almost managerial: stop letting the ideal veto the better. But the subtext carries a sharper accusation. “Pursuit” frames perfection as an active obsession, a self-congratulating chase that feels principled while producing stagnation. “Often” is doing strategic work, too: it grants that high standards matter, then pivots to the real target - the perfectionist mindset that confuses flawlessness with seriousness.

In context, this is classic Will: small, polished sentence; big institutional implication. It fits a late-20th-century American argument about incrementalism, where legislative compromise is dismissed as moral failure and “good enough” is treated as cowardice. The line also reads as a rebuke to a media culture that rewards maximalist takes. If every proposal must solve everything, you get a politics of performative dissatisfaction.

What makes it work is its quiet inversion of values. Perfection sounds like ambition; improvement sounds like settling. Will swaps the prestige, insisting the brave act is iterative progress - the unglamorous labor of making things less bad, then less bad again.