Joseph J. Ellis Quotes

“Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots

— 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

“Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

“God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.”

— 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 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

“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

“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

“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

“It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

“Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.”

— 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

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

“In time to come be shaped by the human mind. Asked”

— 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

“Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.”

— 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

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.

— 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

“I believe I am an honorable man.”

— 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

“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

“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 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

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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

(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

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

— 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

“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

“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

“Namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making.”

— 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

“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

“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