Joseph J. Ellis > Quotes

“Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.”
― Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.”
― Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington

“Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.”
― Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington

“The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet him upon arrival.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington

“If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“In Jefferson's mind great historical leaps forward were almost always the product of a purging, which freed societies from the accumulated debris of the past and thereby allowed the previously obstructed natural forces to flow forward into the future. Simplicity and austerity, not equality or individualism, were the messages of his inaugural march. It was a minimalist statement about a purging of excess and a recovery of essence.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“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 Ellis

“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, Founding Brothers

“permitting the continuance and expansion of slavery as the price to pay for nationhood. This decision meant that tragedy was also built into the American founding, and the only question we can ask is whether it was a Greek tragedy, meaning inevitable and unavoidable, or a Shakespearean tragedy, meaning that it could have gone the other way, and the failure was a function of the racial prejudices the founders harbored in their heads and hearts.10”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“In psychological terms, he was neurotic and she was uncommonly sane. His inevitable eruptions would not threaten the marriage, because she was the center who would always hold.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, First Family: Abigail and John Adams

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience, probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers

“It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced...”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers

“Honor mattered because character mattered. And character mattered because the fate of the American experiment with republican government still required virtuous leaders to survive.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers

“The delegates from the southern states insisted that slaves were property, like horses and sheep, and therefore should not be counted as “Inhabitants.” Franklin countered this claim with an edgy joke, observing that slaves, the last time he looked, did not behave like sheep: “Sheep will never make any insurrections.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“p. 274 ...his trademark decision to surrender power as commander in chief and then president, was not...a sign that he had conquered his ambitions, but rather that he fully realized that all ambitions were inherently insatiable and unconquerable. He knew himself well enough to resist the illusion that he transcended human nature. Unlike Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell before him, and Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao after him, he understood that the greater glory resided in posterity's judgment. If you aspire to live forever in the memory of future generations, you must demonstrate the ultimate self-confidence to leave the final judgment to them. And he did.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington