More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Where other founders gloried in their displays of intellect, Washington’s strategy was the opposite: the less people knew about him, the more he thought he could accomplish.
Opacity was his means of enhancing his power and influencing events.
“You are now extending into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed. When the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice.”
“Errors once discovered are more than half amended,” he liked to say.
“Power required distance, he seems to have reasoned, familiarity and intimacy eroded it.”17 This view of leadership unfortunately had a way of distancing Washington from his subordinates and preventing relaxed camaraderie.
He believed in the infinite perfectibility of Mount Vernon, as if it were a canvas that he could constantly retouch and expand. There he reigned supreme and felt secure as nowhere else.
In the composition of the human frame, there is a good deal of inflammable matter [this meant flammable in the eighteenth century], however dormant it may lie for a time and . . . when the torch is put to it, that which is within you may burst into a blaze.”
