80 Quotes by Joseph J. Ellis

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.