American Dialogue Quotes

“In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“Moreover, the very belief that Americans had somehow discovered the ultimate answer to mankind's eternal quandaries and were now poised to establish heaven on earth was a delusion that deserved to be ranked alongside the fables about the Holy Grail and the fountain of youth. "We may boast that we are one, the chosen people,: he (Adams) warned, " and we may even thank God that we are not like other men, but, after all, it would be but flattery, delusion, the self-deceit of the Pharisee.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“Richard Russell, the segregationist senator from Georgia, warned President Lyndon Johnson that if he signed the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party would lose the South for the next thirty years, which turned out to be a conservative estimate. Johnson declared that the moral principle at stake was worth the political sacrifice, arguably an act of presidential leadership without parallel in the twentieth century. Most of the southern states soon made the transition from Democrat to Republican and from overt to covert forms of racial discrimination.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“The great sin of the originalists is not to harbor a political agenda but to claim they do not, and to base that claim on a level of historical understanding they demonstrably do not possess.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“But whatever his duration, Trump has exposed the deep pools of isolationist sentiment that always lurked beneath the surface in the rural regions of the American heartland, now raised to relief by residents who see themselves as victims rather than beneficiaries of the globalized marketplace America is defending. Moreover, the very fact that a person with Trump’s obvious mental, emotional, and moral limitations could be chosen to lead the free world casts a dark shadow of doubt over the credibility and reliability of the United States as the first democratic superpower.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

“The combination of limitless goals and a fully militarized foreign policy has troubling implications because it mirrors the fateful pattern of rise and fall that has caught almost all preceding world powers in its web. The authoritative account of this imperial syndrome is The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) by Paul Kennedy, which identified the fatal flaw as “imperial overstretch,” meaning the excessive growth of military costs required to manage far-flung obligations, which then saps the economic strength responsible for the earlier ascendance. (Several members of the founding generation, Adams most prominently, were thoroughly familiar with the classical version of this cyclical pattern from the works of Tacitus on the Roman Empire and viewed the misguided policies of the British Empire as the modern version of the same imperial story.) Lurking in the decline-and-fall syndrome is the implication that all empires, like all mortals, must come and go, and that the chief reason for their demise is that the world is an inherently unmanageable place that eventually devours the strength of any and all superpowers that history selects for what is, in effect, an impossible mission.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us