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

“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

“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

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

— Garry Wills

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

“Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments.”

— Garry Wills

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

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

“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

“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

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

“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

“Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.”

— Garry Wills

“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

“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

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

— Garry Wills

“If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.”

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

“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

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) moved from a legitimate to a charismatic role, reversing the course followed by Washington. Yet therewere surface similarities in their careers. Both led military rebellions against English monarchs
Cromwell against Charles I, Washington against George III. Each took local militia
the "train bands" of Cromwell, the colonial levies of Washington
and forged professional armies on a national scale. Each infused a new ethos in his troops
a religious spirit in Cromwell's case, a post-colonial American identity in Washington's.

— Garry Wills

“Stevenson had noble ideas
as did the young Franklin for that matter. But Stevenson felt that the way to implement them was to present himself as a thoughtful idealist and wait for the world to flock to him. He considered it below him, or wrong, to scramble out among the people and ask them what they wanted. Roosevelt grappled voters to him. Stevenson shied off from them. Some thought him too pure to desire power, though he showed ambition when it mattered.”

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

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

— Garry Wills

“Not many of us will be leaders; and even those who are leaders must also be followers much of the time. This is the crucial role. Followers judge leaders. Only if the leaders pass that test do they have any impact. The potential followers, if their judgment is poor, have judged themselves. If the leader takes his or her followers to the goal, to great achievements, it is because the followers were capable of that kind of response.”

— Garry Wills