Quotes from Joseph J. Ellis

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

He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.

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.

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.

I believe I am an honorable man.

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.

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

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.

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.

Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.

If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.

James Jackson actually made menacing faces at the Quakers in the gallery, calling them outright lunatics, then launched into a tirade so emotional and incoherent that reporters in the audience had difficulty recording his words.

I am not a Federalist," he declared in 1789, "because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

In Jefferson's mind great historical leaps forward were almost always the product of a purging, which freed societies from the accumulated debris of the past and thereby allowed the previously obstructed natural forces to flow forward into the future. Simplicity and austerity, not equality or individualism, were the messages of his inaugural march. It was a minimalist statement about a purging of excess and a recovery of essence.

Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.

In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.

God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.

Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr's somewhat stationary shadow.

For Madison, on the other hand, "a Public Debt is a Public curse," and "in a Representative Government greater than in any other."26

In psychological terms, he was neurotic and she was uncommonly sane. His inevitable eruptions would not threaten the marriage, because she was the center who would always hold.

It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.

In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience, probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country.