Top 55 Joseph J. Ellis Quotes
#1. Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.
Joseph J. Ellis
#2. Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies ... the key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada, to the Great Lakes, and to all the Indian Nations.
Joseph J. Ellis
#4. I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such Circumstances, I should have taken my musket upon my Shoulder & entered the Ranks or ... had retir'd to the back country & lived in a Wig-wam. - GEORGE WASHINGTON
Joseph J. Ellis
#5. He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.
Joseph J. Ellis
#6. He found himself in the ironic position of being the indispensable man in a political world that regarded all leaders as disposable.
Joseph J. Ellis
#7. It is as if Clinton had called one of the most respected character witnesses in all of U.S. history to testify that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree.
Joseph J. Ellis
#8. I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.
Joseph J. Ellis
#9. But if insecurity was the primal source of Hamilton's incredibly energy, one would have to conclude that providence had conspired to produce at the most opportune moment perhaps the most creative liability in American history.
Joseph J. Ellis
#10. For Madison, on the other hand, "a Public Debt is a Public curse," and "in a Representative Government greater than in any other."26
Joseph J. Ellis
#11. To my three sons, Peter, Scott, and Alexander who pulled me from the 18th Century and back into the present on a regular basis and therefore made me a better person, thank you. And to my wife, who sits at the table there. Who is right about almost everything.
Joseph J. Ellis
#12. 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.
Joseph J. Ellis
#13. I am not a Federalist," he declared in 1789, "because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. ... If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Joseph J. Ellis
#14. James Jackson actually made menacing faces at the Quakers in the gallery, calling them outright lunatics, then launched into a tirade so emotional and incoherent that reporters in the audience had difficulty recording his words.
Joseph J. Ellis
#15. Eager to oppose Thomas Paine's prescription in Common Sense for a huge single-house legislature that purportedly embodied the will of "the people" in its purest form. For Adams, "the people" was a more complicated, multivoiced, hydra-headed thing that had to be enclosed within different chambers.
Joseph J. Ellis
#16. 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.
Joseph J. Ellis
#17. The term American, like the term democrat, began as an epithet, the former referring to an inferior, provincial creature, the latter to one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.
Joseph J. Ellis
#18. In his first year as president he received 1,881 letters, not including internal correspondence from his cabinet, and sent out 677 letters of his own. This
Joseph J. Ellis
#19. 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.
Joseph J. Ellis
#20. When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend standing next to him when it happened.
Joseph J. Ellis
#21. It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spending out of control.
Joseph J. Ellis
#22. It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.
Joseph J. Ellis
#23. The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet him upon arrival.
Joseph J. Ellis
#24. God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.
Joseph J. Ellis
#25. Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.
Joseph J. Ellis
#26. Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.
Joseph J. Ellis
#27. One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.
Joseph J. Ellis
#28. A lifelong disciple of Lord Chesterfield's maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased as long as he did it with style.
Joseph J. Ellis
#29. All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of forests and trees.
Joseph J. Ellis
#30. In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months.
Joseph J. Ellis
#31. (Asked to explain the defeat, Adams put it succinctly: "In general, our Generals were out generalled.") Washington
Joseph J. Ellis
#32. Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.
Joseph J. Ellis
#33. Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London.
Joseph J. Ellis
#34. If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.
Joseph J. Ellis
#35. I deeply regret having let stand and later confirming the assumption that I went to Vietnam. For this and any other distortions about my personal life, I want to apologize to my family, friends, colleagues and students. Beyond that circle, however, I shall have no further comment.
Joseph J. Ellis
#36. His (Washington's) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival of the Continental Army.
Joseph J. Ellis
#37. 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.
Joseph J. Ellis
#38. The land of opportunity, where credentials mattered less than demonstrated ability.
Joseph J. Ellis
#39. Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making.
Joseph J. Ellis
#40. Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.
Joseph J. Ellis
#41. Namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction.
Joseph J. Ellis
#42. Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.
Joseph J. Ellis
#44. Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.
Joseph J. Ellis
#45. Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he (Jefferson) tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and the worldly imperfections as the world's problems rather than his own.
Joseph J. Ellis
#47. Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.
Joseph J. Ellis
#48. 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.
Joseph J. Ellis
#49. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution.
Joseph J. Ellis
#50. Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.
Joseph J. Ellis
#51. [quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots
Joseph J. Ellis
#52. Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.
Joseph J. Ellis
#53. Grand visions, even those as prescient as Washington's, must nevertheless negotiate the damnable particularities that history in the short run tosses up before history in the long run arrives to validate the vision.
Joseph J. Ellis
#54. In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.
Joseph J. Ellis
#55. I'm one of those people that believes you should start writing before you think you're ready.
Joseph J. Ellis
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