Joseph J. Ellis > Quotes

“[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, His Excellency: George Washington

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“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

“Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington

“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, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

“One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually acknowledged that his antislavery vision came to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation