Joseph J. Ellis Quotations

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.

I believe I am an honorable man.

Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.

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.

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.

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.

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.

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

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

...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.

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.

I'm one of those people that believes you should start writing before you think you're ready.

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

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.

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.

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