Garry Wills

“Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models.”

“We think of the past as a book we can open, read, and learn from. But it's not a book; it's a landscape, and we are in it.”

“The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.”

“The market is a mechanism for sorting the efficient from the inefficient, it is not a substitute for responsibility.”

“The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.”

“People who are in power make their own truths.”

“The Founding Fathers were not only revolutionaries but also reformers, and conservative reformers at that.”

“The sermon, in effect, is a political act.”