Garry Wills Quotes

#1. Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments.

Garry Wills

#2. The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers ... Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.

Garry Wills

#3. Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.

Garry Wills

#4. I would rather listen to plays in the car than read them.

Garry Wills

#5. It's not healthy for a society if the people hate their own government.

Garry Wills

#6. I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.

Garry Wills

#7. I have nothing against priests. In fact, I tried for a time to be one ... It should be clear, then, that I respect, and am often fond of, the many priests in my life.

Garry Wills

#8. Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.

Garry Wills

#9. Whenever you pray, make sure you do it at school assemblies and football games, like the demonstrative creatures who pray before large television audiences. That is the real goal of the thing. But do not, I urge you, pray all alone in your home where no one can see. That does not get you ratings.

Garry Wills

#10. The whole point of free expression is not to make ideas exempt from criticism but to expose them to it.

Garry Wills

#11. Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

Garry Wills

#12. The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.

Garry Wills

#13. I'm hardly macho. I present myself as very unnoticeable.

Garry Wills

#14. Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.

Garry Wills

#15. There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose?

Garry Wills

#16. To "bear arms" is, in itself, a military term. One does not bear arms against a rabbit.

Garry Wills

#17. I don't get far enough into a boring book to hate it.

Garry Wills

#18. Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.

Garry Wills

#19. Term limits mean that you don't trust the voters. 'Stop me before I vote again.'

Garry Wills

#20. As a framer and defender of the Constitution [Madison] had no peer.

Garry Wills

#21. God initiates the salvation of man to express the Father's love, not a punitive deflecting of the Father's anger.

Garry Wills

#22. The romantic artist, off alone in his storm-battered castle, fuming whole worlds from his brain, reflects his culture's most persistent myth, of God creating from a primal loneliness.

Garry Wills

#23. I don't really write for an audience. I just write what the subject seems to me to require.

Garry Wills

#24. There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.

Garry Wills

#25. If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

Garry Wills

#26. Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers.

Garry Wills