Quotes by Garry Wills

About Garry Wills:

Garry Wills is a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church.
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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.

Garry Wills

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 k...

Garry Wills

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

Garry Wills

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.

Garry Wills

I would rather listen to plays in the car than read them.

Garry Wills

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.

Garry Wills

Leadership - mobilization toward a common goal.

Garry Wills

I have nothing against priests. In fact, I tried for a time to be one... It should be clear, then, that I respect, and am often fond of, the many priests in my life.

Garry Wills

I don't really write for an audience. I just write what the subject seems to me to require.

Garry Wills

There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine...

Garry Wills

I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.

Garry Wills

I'm hardly macho. I present myself as very unnoticeable.

Garry Wills

I don't get far enough into a boring book to hate it.

Garry Wills

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

Garry Wills

Author Bio

  • NameGarry Wills
  • DescriptionAmerican academic
  • BornMay 22, 1934
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian
  • AwardsNational Humanities Medal; Pulitzer Prize For General Non-Fiction