Garry Wills Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

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 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.

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

Garry Wills
The French philosopher Denis Diderot said that the best actor sits inside his own performance as a cool spectator of the effects he is creating in an audience.

Garry Wills
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.

Garry Wills
Keeping as many channels open as possible is the diplomatic imperative.

Garry Wills
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.

Garry Wills