Garry Wills Quotations

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.

Leadership - mobilization toward a common goal.

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

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

It's not healthy for a society if the people hate their own government.

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

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.

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.

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.

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