Joseph J. Ellis Quotes

[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots

Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

Remember sometimes just the rush of having a crush is a temptation, even if it is inappropriate, but beware of playing with fire, you will get burned.

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.

And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forgiveness.

Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making.

Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.

I believe I am an honorable man.

I'm one of those people that believes you should start writing before you think you're ready.

...the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented a confession of unworthiness for national office.

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.

Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.

He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.

The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own "hunting shirts" to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen.

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.

Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed "his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.

in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked

For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse, ” and “in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26

It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.

Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.

His (Washington's) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival of the Continental Army.

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.