Top 50 Joseph J. Ellis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

2. “I’m one of those people that believes you should start writing before you think you’re ready.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

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

— Joseph J. Ellis

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

— Joseph J. Ellis

5. “Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

6. “Honor mattered because character mattered. And character mattered because the fate of the American experiment with republican government still required virtuous leaders to survive.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

7. “Taking on Washington was the fastest way to commit political suicide in the revolutionary era.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

8. “Hindsight history, sometimes call counterfactual history, is usually not history at all, but most often a condescending game of oneupmanship in which the living play political tricks on the dead, who are not around to defend themselves.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

9. “Washington’s task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

10. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

11. “The term American, like the term democrat, began as an epithet, the former referring to an inferior, provincial creature, the latter to one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

12. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

13. “The first is the political tale of how thirteen colonies came together and agreed on the decision to secede from the British Empire. Here the center point is the Continental Congress, and the leading players, at least in my version, are John Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

14. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

15. “I believe I am an honorable man.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

16. “William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the acknowledged architect of the British victory in the French and Indian War, rose to condemn the decision to militarize the conflict. He recommended the withdrawal from Boston of all British troops, who could only serve as incendiaries for a provocative incident that triggered a war.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

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

— Joseph J. Ellis

18. “The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

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

— Joseph J. Ellis

20. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

21. “The delegates from the southern states insisted that slaves were property, like horses and sheep, and therefore should not be counted as “Inhabitants.” Franklin countered this claim with an edgy joke, observing that slaves, the last time he looked, did not behave like sheep: “Sheep will never make any insurrections.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

22. “The second is the military narrative of the battles on Long Island and Manhattan, where the British army and navy delivered a series of devastating defeats to an American army of amateurs, but missed whatever chance existed to end it all. The focal point of this story is the Continental Army, and the major actors are George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and the British brothers Richard and William Howe.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

23. “For Adams it was especially distressing to witness such conspicuous failure “in the first formation of Government erected by the People themselves on their own Authority, without the poisonous Interposition of Kings and Priests.” There was, to be sure, such a thing as “The Cause,” but the glorious potency of that concept did not translate to “The People of the United States.”16.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

24. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

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

— Joseph J. Ellis

26. “Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

27. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

28. “In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

29. “Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

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

— Joseph J. Ellis

31. “But the question made no sense to the bulk of the troops, who regarded instinctive obedience to orders and ready acceptance of subordination within a military hierarchy as infringements on the very liberty they were fighting for. They saw themselves as invincible, not because they were disciplined soldiers like the redcoats but because they were patriotic, liberty-loving men willing to risk their lives for their convictions.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

32. “The great sin of the originalists is not to harbor a political agenda but to claim they do not, and to base that claim on a level of historical understanding they demonstrably do not possess.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

33. “Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

34. “They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

35. “Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed “his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

36. “If Jefferson seemed predestined to tell people what they wanted to hear, Adams now acknowledged that his own destiny was just the opposite: to tell them what they needed to know.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

37. “Madison’s experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that “the people” was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial perspectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

38. “For example, the Continental Congress made a deliberate decision to avoid any consideration of the slavery question, even though most delegates were fully aware that it violated the principles they claimed to be fighting for. Adams is most revealing on this score because, more than anyone else, he articulated the need to defer the full promise of the American Revolution in order to assure a robust consensus on the independence question.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

39. “I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else’s.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

40. “They recognized from the beginning that they were a rare match. There were so many topics they could talk about easily and just as many things they did not have to talk about at all.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

41. “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.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

42. “As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only “His Excellency.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

43. “The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

44. “It is richly ironic that one of the few original intentions they all shared was opposition to any judicial doctrine of “original intent.” To be sure, they all wished to be remembered, but they did not want to be embalmed.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

45. “One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

46. “First, it is crucial to recognize that Washington’s extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

47. “Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

48. “Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a “standing army” struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous threat to republican principles.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

49. “It is well known, that when one side only of a story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

50. “Over the ensuing decades and centuries, to be sure, the Bill of Rights has ascended to an elevated region in the American imagination. But in its own time, and in Madison’s mind, it was only an essential epilogue that concluded a brilliant campaign to adjust the meaning of the American Revolution to a national scale.”

— Joseph J. Ellis