Quotes from Garry Wills

I don't get far enough into a boring book to hate it.

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose?

The romantic artist, off alone in his storm-battered castle, fuming whole worlds from his brain, reflects his culture's most persistent myth, of God creating from a primal loneliness.

The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers. ... Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.

I have nothing against priests. In fact, I tried for a time to be one... It should be clear, then, that I respect, and am often fond of, the many priests in my life.

Talmud, the Halakha, the Qur'an, the Bible, the (Sikh) Granth Sahib—as "true and accurate in all particulars."4 How could a dying religious attitude, scheduled for elimination by the end of the twentieth century—already, as it were, being measured for its coffin—dance away from the dirge with renewed vitality? More pointedly, how could this escape

There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.

Term limits mean that you don't trust the voters. 'Stop me before I vote again.'

I don't really write for an audience. I just write what the subject seems to me to require.

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.

God initiates the salvation of man to express the Father's love, not a punitive deflecting of the Father's anger.

The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.

Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.

Nothing stuns others more than the quiet eruption of a normally quiet man.

You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. —GILBERT CHESTERTON

Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.

Other humans can die a grisly death, as Jesus did. They cannot be born, as he was, as God incarnate.

Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments.

Inefficiency is to be our safeguard against despotism.

Love is the test. In the gospel of Jesus, love is everything.

The tapes are the real man—mean, vindictive, panicky, striking first in anticipation of being struck, trying to lift his own friable self-esteem by shoving others down. Murray Kempton said he wanted to leave no fingerprints, but he went about it in such a way as to leave his fingerprints all over his story. Nixon's real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero. He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.

If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute.