Garry Wills > Quotes

“Only the winners decide what were war crimes. ”
― Garry Wills

“Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.”
― Garry wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

“God initiates the salvation of man to express the Father's love, not a punitive deflecting of the Father's anger.”
― Garry Wills, Why Priests?

“You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. —GILBERT CHESTERTON”
― Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power

“Nothing stuns others more than the quiet eruption of a normally quiet man.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

“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, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

“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, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

“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, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

“Inefficiency is to be our safeguard against despotism.”
― Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government

“[T]he American fanatic has always suffered moral disorientation at the mere thought of anyone 'getting something for nothing'.”
― Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man

“...that the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots. It redefined the presidency, as in all respects America's "Commander in Chief" (a term that took on a new and unconstitutional meaning in this period). It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control. It redefined Congress, as an executor of the executive. And it redefined the Supreme Court, as a follower of the follower of the executive. Only one part of the government had the supreme power, the Bomb, and all else must defer to it, for the good of the nation, for the good of the world, for the custody of the future, in a world of perpetual emergency superseding ordinary constitutional restrictions.”
― Garry Wills

“[During Election of 1800]
[Jefferson] fanned the talk of armed resistance. In his Pennsylvania Avenue onversation with John Adams, he told the president that any act to block his election 'would probably produce resistance by force and incalculable consequences,' Considering this threat of violence, perhaps we should not be surprised that Adams did not stay in Washington for Jefferson's inauguration. Perhaps that threat was still ringing in his ears. Nor was this an isolated remark of Jefferson's.”
― Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power

“If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute.”
― Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home

“Words had to complete the work of the guns.”
― Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America

“Other humans can die a grisly death, as Jesus did. They cannot be born, as he was, as God incarnate.”
― Garry Wills

“Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments.”
― Garry Wills, Augustine's Confessions: A Biography

“Th fight over the [twelfth] amendment also confirms what Henry Adams treated as the "comedy" of Jefferson in power--that his efforts, and those of his followers, continually worked against their declared object. Jefferson came saying that he would reduce the power of the executive and the centralizing nationalism of the Federalists. But the Twelfth Admendment, by subordinating the vice president, increased the power of the president, who was able to run unopposed by anyone in his party once he was nominated, and who was served by the man in second place.”
― Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power

“For Max Weber, charismatic power must always yield in time, either gracefully or by violence, to the everyday order of kingship (traditional rule) or contractual 'modern' government (legal rule). And if the course taken is toward *legal* rule, then it will tend, of necessity, toward bureaucracy, toward patterns of accountability, predictability, oversight, and record-keeping. By contrast with a swift and arbitrary charismatic rule, this kind of government will seem to many 'inefficient.' In the same way, due process in criminal law is slower than arbitrary justice. But, outside crisis circumstances, the arbitrary soon becomes indefensible.”
― Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power by Wills, Garry(November 14, 2002) Paperback

“Louisiana looked like a bonanza to people anxious to unload their slaves at high prices--and it looked that way precisely because Jefferson excluded slave importations from abroad.”
― Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power

“The tapes are the real man—mean, vindictive, panicky, striking first in anticipation of being struck, trying to lift his own friable self-esteem by shoving others down. Murray Kempton said he wanted to leave no fingerprints, but he went about it in such a way as to leave his fingerprints all over his story. Nixon’s real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero. He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.”
― Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man

“interlocutor—a”
― Garry Wills, Saint Augustine

“He walks through social barriers and taboos as if they were cobwebs.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

“The creation of a "designated" ticket also made it possible for the president to run not as an individual but as a member of a team chosen for geographical spread and numerical inclusiveness. This can be seen as helping build national unity, but it undercut states' rights, as the small states argued in the debate over the amendment. (Delaware refused to ratify the amendment on just those grounds.) Even the reduction of the chances for a tie vote in the Electoral College took power away from the small states, since they had an equal vote in cases of a tie.”
― Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power

“Jefferson belonged to that large class if southerners--including the best of them, nen like Washington and Madison--who knew that slavery was evil, but felt they could not cut back in the evil without cutting the ground out from under them. They knew, as well, that they would lose their influence over other southerners if they went against the system off which they lived.”
― Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power

“...one of the main lessons is that people should not be separated into classes of the clean and the unclean, the worthy and the unworthy, the respectable and the unrespectable. … (missing) the point of their union with the Father, whose love is undiscriminating and inclusive, not gradated and excessive.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

“Love is the test. In the gospel of Jesus, love is everything.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

“Talmud, the Halakha, the Qur’an, the Bible, the (Sikh) Granth Sahib—as “true and accurate in all particulars.”4 How could a dying religious attitude, scheduled for elimination by the end of the twentieth century—already, as it were, being measured for its coffin—dance away from the dirge with renewed vitality? More pointedly, how could this escape”
― Garry Wills, What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters

“What is the kind of religion Jesus opposed? Any religion that is proud of its virtue, like the boastful Pharisee. Any that is self-righteous, quick to judge and condemn, ready to impose burdens rather than share or lift them. Any that exalts its own officers, proud of its trappings, building expensive monuments to itself. Any that neglects the poor and cultivates the rich, any that scorns outcasts and flatters the rulers of this world. If that sounds like just about every form of religion we know, then we can see how far off from religion Jesus stood.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

“People are instinctively drawn to Jesus certain that he understands suffering, their particular suffering, that he sees it in their eyes even before they speak. God's chosen are the suffering ones, whose inner luminescence is emphasized by the fragility of its container.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

“It was the pride and ostentation of power the Jesus rebuked in spiritual leaders.”
― Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant