Garry Wills Quotes

#1. Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

John Leonard

#3. Having a purpose and knowing exactly what your values are will add additional years to your life.

Dan Buettner

#4. 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

#5. I'm American by birth, but I consider myself Canadian.

Sondra Radvanovsky

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

Garry Wills

#7. 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

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

Garry Wills

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

Garry Wills

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

Garry Wills

#11. 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

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

Garry Wills

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

Garry Wills

#14. Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It's neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.

Francesca Lia Block

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

Garry Wills

#16. 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

#17. The invention progress is tough sometimes. When I first choreographed the Drunken Master in the past with Jackie Chan, I spent months to create the whole sequence. There were no fight sequences before; it's just a name. I have to choreograph it all by myself.

Yuen Woo-ping

#18. What was wrong with darkness? In the darkness of the Earth the Mother caused seeds to sprout. In the darkness of the womb a baby was conceived. In the darkness of the graves her Children returned to her.

Dave Duncan

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

Garry Wills

#20. 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

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

Garry Wills

#22. In many societies the domestic social costs of adjustment to changing patterns of comparative advantage are believed to outweigh the advantages of further trade liberalization.

Robert Gilpin

#23. The happiest woman sees not gladness alone reflected from her mirror; its surface will inevitably be sometimes dimmed with sighs.

Louise Colet

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

Garry Wills

#25. 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

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

Garry Wills

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

Garry Wills

#28. I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.

James Boswell

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

Garry Wills

#30. There's no question in my mind that there's a problem with the funding of our universities here in Quebec.

Pierre Moreau

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

Garry Wills

#32. 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

#33. At some point, you have to make the decision between losing the person you love and your own sanity.

Lucinda Riley

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. One day, I'll take a holiday and manage to do no work on it at all and just enjoy being away - however that won't be for some time.

C.S. Woolley

#37. 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

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

Garry Wills

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

Garry Wills

#40. Prosperity is a by-product of an effective management of whatever God provides.

Matthew Ashimolowo