Washington Quotes

“Almost every revolution in the history of the world, however idealistically begun, had ended in tyranny. The American Revolution had now reached its moment of major political crisis.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“In another way, which Washington could not foresee, his image was much more grievously damaged. A painful physical disability was being grafted onto his legend so that in the minds of future Americans his attribute—like Saint Catherine’s wheel or Saint Sebastian’s arrows—became ill-fitting false teeth. Washington did wear clumsy dentures. Only one of his own teeth was in his mouth in 1789 when he presided over the capital in New York. That tooth soon vanished. Washington wore terrifying-looking contraptions, made of substances like hippopotamus ivory. The upper and lower jaws, that were hinged together at the back of the mouth, opened and closed with the assistance of springs. He himself complained that they distorted his lips. However, as he could command the best dentists, he was probably no more disfigured than was then common among the elderly”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“The Alien Act greatly lengthened the period an immigrant would have to wait before he could apply for citizenship and empowered the President to expel any alien he considered dangerous.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Those Americans who wished to serve foreign causes were described as “fools and dupes.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Washington assumed that both envoys, being American patriots, would put American interests first.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Washington prepared, if only in his mind, the agenda of the meetings, and was so opposed to deviations that his ministers could only initiate a subject if they could somehow hook it onto some matter the President had decided to discuss. He was convivial with his cabinet ministers, but at social occasions he engaged only in light talk. No government official and no adviser, not even Jefferson or Hamilton, was encouraged to request an interview on his own. At any interview the President did grant, he discouraged personal revelation. No one was allowed to weep on his shoulder.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Charleston, a city where he much admired the “beauty” of the streets, “at least four hundred ladies, the number and appearance of which exceeded anything of the kind I had ever seen.” He was later to send his “grateful respect” to the “fair compatriots” of Charleston who had so “flattered” him.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Washington had never before visited North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia. Traveling south along the coast—Halifax, Newbern, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah—and back along the fall line—Augusta, Camden, Salisbury, Winston-Salem”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“He backed Jefferson in a renewed attempt to secure laws that applied to British ships the same restrictions Britain applied to American.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“During the 1930’s, it became fashionable to argue that the Constitutional Convention was a right-wing plot to put shackles on the people.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“The Hamiltonian system had no need for slavery. Washington felt that it was the Virginia institution that would have in the end to give way. “I clearly foresee,” he told an English caller, “that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“He proved to be the only Virginia founding father to free all his slaves.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“They appear to me to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis, but in what they will result, that Being who sees, foresees, and directs all things alone can tell. The vessel is afloat or very nearly so, and considering myself as a passenger only, I shall trust to the mariners, whose duty is to watch, to steer it into a safe port.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all, and this, my dear friend, being the order of my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“It was the triumph of a man who knows how to learn, not in the narrow sense of studying other people’s conceptions but in the transcendent sense of making a synthesis from the totality of experience.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Washington survived four British commanders in chief.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“The suggestion seemed to Nicola highly reasonable. Every major nation in the world was then ruled by a king, and royalty had been throughout history almost exclusively the accepted form of government. But Washington replied, “No occurrence in the course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the army...I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity” a conception that was ‘big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Most of the brickbats now being thrown at Washington are figments of the modern imagination. In being ourselves untrue to the highest teaching of the American tradition, we of this generation have tended to denigrate that tradition, to seek out all that was unworthy, to emphasize whatever justifies national distrust.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“The most important labor would be to solidify the government by cementing to it the allegiance of the people. This would be done by visible virtue, a spirit within the government not of contention but compromise, by soothing regional prejudices, by improving the prosperity of the nation.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Fortunately, such political theorists as England’s Blackstone and France’s Montesquieu had worked out on paper a solution. The government should consist of branches, chosen in different manners at different times for different terms of office, which would check and balance each other and would all have to agree before a proposition became law. Foreign theory and also American experience as it came down from the colonial era urged an executive, a legislature made up of two houses, and a judiciary.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coercive power.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“When Washington left the Presidency, he made use of the Pennsylvania law which he had previously taken care to evade. He slipped into freedom several of his house slaves so quietly, by simply leaving them behind, that no member of the southern opposition even guessed. Indeed, the secret remained undiscovered until this writer happened on a clue when examining a seemingly trivial letter to Washington’s tailor.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible. In Paris, we may suppose these tumults are peculiarly disastrous at this time, when the public mind is in a ferment and when (as is always the case on such occasions) there are not wanting wicked and designing men whose element is confusion and who will not hesitate in destroying public tranquillity to gain a favorite point.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Since the convention was trying to establish a government altogether new under the sun, there were no precedents to violate—but also none to steer by. All the issues involved in government stalked the hall at one time or another. Among the troublesome problems were drawing lines between state and federal power, decisions concerning slavery (the more defensively protected in the South because disapproved of in the North), southern suspicions that federal trade regulations would make them serfs to New England shippers, taxation, fear of tyranny at one extreme or anarchy at the other. The level of agreement reached was phenomenal, and, when agreement proved too difficult, many a decision was left vague, to be worked out in actual practice.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man

“Washington defined the colonists’ “secret resource” as “the unconquerable resolution of our citizens.”
― James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man