Joseph J. Ellis

Quotes

• “Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown...”
• “They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that def...”
• “It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto th...”
• “Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The...”
• “I am not a Federalist,” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of ...”
• “One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had ...”
• “The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear t...”
• “Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded...”
• “Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his adv...”
• “He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decisi...”
• “His (Washington's) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival o...”
• “The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Co...”
• “Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed "his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of sereni...”
• “For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse,” and “in a Representative Government greater than in a...”
• “If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of ...”
• “And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forg...”
• “Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begi...”
• “in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked”