Quotes from Garry Wills

It was the pride and ostentation of power the Jesus rebuked in spiritual leaders.

Louisiana looked like a bonanza to people anxious to unload their slaves at high prices--and it looked that way precisely because Jefferson excluded slave importations from abroad.

one of the main lessons is that people should not be separated into classes of the clean and the unclean, the worthy and the unworthy, the respectable and the unrespectable. … (missing) the point of their union with the Father, whose love is undiscriminating and inclusive, not gradated and excessive.

He must have been like a thin brown skeleton autumn leaf dancing eternally before the wind; but in truth it was he that was the wind.

People are instinctively drawn to Jesus certain that he understands suffering, their particular suffering, that he sees it in their eyes even before they speak. God's chosen are the suffering ones, whose inner luminescence is emphasized by the fragility of its container.

interlocutor—a

Jefferson belonged to that large class if southerners--including the best of them, nen like Washington and Madison--who knew that slavery was evil, but felt they could not cut back in the evil without cutting the ground out from under them. They knew, as well, that they would lose their influence over other southerners if they went against the system off which they lived.

He walks through social barriers and taboos as if they were cobwebs.

T]he American fanatic has always suffered moral disorientation at the mere thought of anyone 'getting something for nothing'.

Words had to complete the work of the guns.

Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.

I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.

I'm hardly macho. I present myself as very unnoticeable.

Leadership - mobilization toward a common goal.