Joseph J. Ellis Quotes & Sayings

Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy. — Joseph J. Ellis

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making. — Joseph J. Ellis

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

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

(Asked to explain the defeat, Adams put it succinctly: "In general, our Generals were out generalled.") Washington — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

But the question made no sense to the bulk of the troops, who regarded instinctive obedience to orders and ready acceptance of subordination within a military hierarchy as infringements on the very liberty they were fighting for. They saw themselves as invincible, not because they were disciplined soldiers like the redcoats but because they were patriotic, liberty-loving men willing to risk their lives for their convictions. — Joseph J. Ellis

The second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson's imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

There was in Madison's critical assessment of the state governments a discernible antidemocratic ethos rooted in the conviction that political popularity generated a toxic chemistry of appeasement and demagoguery that privileged popular whim and short-term interests at the expense of the long-term public interest. — Joseph J. Ellis

The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. — Joseph J. Ellis

Madison's experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that "the people" was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial perspectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas. — Joseph J. 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

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

If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

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

The second is the military narrative of the battles on Long Island and Manhattan, where the British army and navy delivered a series of devastating defeats to an American army of amateurs, but missed whatever chance existed to end it all. The focal point of this story is the Continental Army, and the major actors are George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and the British brothers Richard and William Howe. — Joseph J. Ellis

Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a "standing army" struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous threat to republican principles. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

I'm one of those people that believes you should start writing before you think you're ready. — Joseph J. Ellis

The land of opportunity, where credentials mattered less than demonstrated ability. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

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

(John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinching evidence that his position was principled, because it was obvious that he was not courting popular opinion. His alienation, therefore, was a measure of his integrity. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

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

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

For Adams it was especially distressing to witness such conspicuous failure "in the first formation of Government erected by the People themselves on their own Authority, without the poisonous Interposition of Kings and Priests." There was, to be sure, such a thing as "The Cause," but the glorious potency of that concept did not translate to "The People of the United States."16 — Joseph J. Ellis

Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

I believe I am an honorable man. — Joseph J. Ellis

Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable. — Joseph J. Ellis

Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.) While less confident men blathered on, he remained silent, thereby making himself a vessel into which admirers for their fondest convictions, becoming a kind of receptacle for diverse aspirations that magically came together in one man. — Joseph J. Ellis

[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots — Joseph J. Ellis

Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli. — Joseph J. Ellis

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made. — Joseph J. Ellis

Ordinary British soldiers harbored several strange preconceptions of their own. Some were surprised that the colonists wore clothes, thinking they would dress like Indians. Other had expected to encounter roving bands of wild animals in the manner of African jungles. And when a loyalist came aboard one ship to help it into port, the British crew and troops were dumbfounded. "All the People had been of the Opinion," they exclaimed, "that the inhabitants of America were black. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

Namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

The first is the political tale of how thirteen colonies came together and agreed on the decision to secede from the British Empire. Here the center point is the Continental Congress, and the leading players, at least in my version, are John Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. — Joseph J. Ellis

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war. — Joseph J. Ellis

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the acknowledged architect of the British victory in the French and Indian War, rose to condemn the decision to militarize the conflict. He recommended the withdrawal from Boston of all British troops, who could only serve as incendiaries for a provocative incident that triggered a war. — Joseph J. Ellis

In Madison's formulation, the right to bear arms was not inherent but derivative, depending on service in the militia. The recent Supreme Court decision (Heller v. District of Columbia, 2008) that found the right to bear arms an inherent and nearly unlimited right is clearly at odds with Madison's original intentions.37 — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

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

His (Washington's) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival of the Continental Army. — Joseph J. Ellis

Brother," wrote one Cherokee chief, "we give up to our white brothers all the land we could any how spare, and have but little left...and we hope you won't let any people take any more from us without our consent. We are neither birds nor fish; we can neither fly in the air nor live under water.... We are made by the same hand and in the same shape as yourselves. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

Over the ensuing decades and centuries, to be sure, the Bill of Rights has ascended to an elevated region in the American imagination. But in its own time, and in Madison's mind, it was only an essential epilogue that concluded a brilliant campaign to adjust the meaning of the American Revolution to a national scale. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

In time to come be shaped by the human mind. Asked — Joseph J. Ellis

The old adage applied: if God were in the details, Colonel Washington would have been there to greet him upon arrival. — Joseph J. Ellis

Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: "Having now finished the work assigned me," he announced, "I now retire from the great theater of action." In so doing, he became the supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so ready to give it up. — Joseph J. Ellis

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

As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only His Excellency. — Joseph J. Ellis

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