Best 25 quotes of Garry Wills on MyQuotes

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.

As a framer and defender of the Constitution [Madison] had no peer.

Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads - they are not there accidentally. Soviet infantry manual, issued in the 1930's Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.

If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

Leadership - mobilization toward a common goal.

Not many of us will be leaders; and even those who are leaders must also be followers much of the time. This is the crucial role. Followers judge leaders. Only if the leaders pass that test do they have any impact. The potential followers, if their judgment is poor, have judged themselves. If the leader takes his or her followers to the goal, to great achievements, it is because the followers were capable of that kind of response.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) moved from a legitimate to a charismatic role, reversing the course followed by Washington. Yet therewere surface similarities in their careers. Both led military rebellions against English monarchs--Cromwell against Charles I, Washington against George III. Each took local militia--the "train bands" of Cromwell, the colonial levies of Washington--and forged professional armies on a national scale. Each infused a new ethos in his troops--a religious spirit in Cromwell's case, a post-colonial American identity in Washington's.

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

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

Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers.

Stevenson had noble ideas--as did the young Franklin for that matter. But Stevenson felt that the way to implement them was to present himself as a thoughtful idealist and wait for the world to flock to him. He considered it below him, or wrong, to scramble out among the people and ask them what they wanted. Roosevelt grappled voters to him. Stevenson shied off from them. Some thought him too pure to desire power, though he showed ambition when it mattered.

Term limits mean that you don't trust the voters. 'Stop me before I vote again.'

The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leader and followers.

The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers. ... Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose?

The romantic artist, off alone in his storm-battered castle, fuming whole worlds from his brain, reflects his culture's most persistent myth, of God creating from a primal loneliness.

The whole point of free expression is not to make ideas exempt from criticism but to expose them to it.

To "bear arms" is, in itself, a military term. One does not bear arms against a rabbit.

Whenever you pray, make sure you do it at school assemblies and football games, like the demonstrative creatures who pray before large television audiences. That is the real goal of the thing. But do not, I urge you, pray all alone in your home where no one can see. That does not get you ratings.

Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.

Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.

Inefficiency is to be our safeguard against despotism.

...that the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots. It redefined the presidency, as in all respects America's "Commander in Chief" (a term that took on a new and unconstitutional meaning in this period). It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control. It redefined Congress, as an executor of the executive. And it redefined the Supreme Court, as a follower of the follower of the executive. Only one part of the government had the supreme power, the Bomb, and all else must defer to it, for the good of the nation, for the good of the world, for the custody of the future, in a world of perpetual emergency superseding ordinary constitutional restrictions.

The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.