If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.
John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian mood...
[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots
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 li...
I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.
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 psychol...
It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.
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 obstruc...
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...
He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.
Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French...
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.
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 essent...
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 t...
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 princip...
God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.
For Madison, on the other hand, a Public Debt is a Public curse, and in a Representative Government greater than in any other.26
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 Interpos...
A lifelong disciple of Lord Chesterfield’s maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased as long as he did it with style.
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.