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Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Quotes of Author: Joseph J. Ellis
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  1. Joseph J. Ellis _ The Quartet: Orchestrating the

    In Madison's formulation, the right to bear arms was not inherent but derivative, depending on service in the militia. The recent Supreme Court decision {Heller v. District of Columbia, 2008} that found the right to bear arms an inherent and nearly unlimited right is clearly at odds with Madison's original intentions.37
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  2. Joseph J. Ellis _ American Dialogue: The

    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.
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  3. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Only ten years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicians alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold necausemit did not exist.
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  4. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    {T}he revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties."
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  5. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Throughout most of his life, Washington's physical vigor had been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than his male contemporaries. {John Adams claimed that the reason Washington was invariably selected to lead every national effort was that he was always the tallest man in the room.} A detached description of his physical features would have made him sound like an ugly, misshapen oaf: pockmarked face, decayed teeth, oversized eye sockets, massive nose, heavy in the hips, gargantuan hands and feet. But somehow, when put together and set in motion, the full package conveyed sheer majesty. As one of his biographers put it, his body did not just occupy space; it seemed to organize the space around it. He dominated a room not just with his size, but with an almost electric presence. "He has so much martial dignity in his deportment," observed Benjamin Rush, "that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side."10 Not only did bullets and shrapnel seem to veer away from his body in battle, not only did he once throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was 215 feet high, not only was he generally regarded as the finest horseman in Virginia, the rider who led the pack in most fox hunts, he also possessed for most of his life a physical constitution that seemed immune to disease or injury. Other soldiers came down with frostbite after swimming ice-choked rivers. Other statesmen fell by the wayside, lacking the stamina to handle the relentless political pressure. Washington suffered none of these ailments. Adams said that Washington had "the gift of taciturnity," meaning he had an instinct for the eloquent silence. This same principle held true on the physical front. His medical record was eloquently empty.11
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  6. Joseph J. Ellis _ American Sphinx: The Character

    I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. . . . Such an addiction is the last degredation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
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  7. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    First, the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. Their interactions and juxtapositions generated a dynamic form of balance and equilibrium, not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other in much the way that Madison in Federalist 10 claimed that multiple factions would do in a large republic.
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  8. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.
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  9. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    The five Pillars of Aristocracy," he argued, "are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both of the two last.
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  10. Joseph J. Ellis _ His Excellency: George

    Having now finished the work assigned me," Washington solemnly said, "I retire from the great theatre of Action. . . . I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the enjoyments of public life." The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greatest exit in American history.
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  11. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    The Adams presidency, in fact, might be the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which presidential leadership takes shape, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa.
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  12. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Though many historians have taken a compromise or split-the-different position over the ensuing years, the basic choice has remained constant, as historians have declared themselves Jeffersonian or Hamiltonians, committed individualists or dedicated nationalists, liberals or conservatives
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