"Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made"
About this Quote
“Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made” is Ellis at his most quietly corrective, pushing back against the seductive American genre of moral biography: the spotless founder, the flawless hero, the clean arc. The line is built to puncture a fantasy without sounding like a takedown. “Even” concedes the reader’s desire for greatness, then denies the hidden premise that greatness equals purity. “Best” is doing double duty, too: it nods to accomplishment and virtue while reminding you how slippery those categories are once you zoom in on actual decisions.
Ellis’s intent, as a writer steeped in the Founding era, is to normalize error as a feature of consequential lives, not an embarrassing footnote. The subtext is historiographical: don’t confuse a usable legend with an accurate human record. He’s signaling a method - judge people in motion, inside their moment, with incomplete information and competing loyalties - rather than treating history as a courtroom where the only verdicts are canonization or cancellation.
The context that makes the sentence land is our appetite for exemplary narratives. We want figures whose lives can be exported as lessons, cleanly. Ellis offers a messier model: success doesn’t immunize you from bad calls; ethical intention doesn’t prevent harm; a life can be “best” by one measure and compromised by another. It’s a spare sentence that smuggles in a whole argument about how to read lives: with admiration, yes, but without the consolations of myth.
Ellis’s intent, as a writer steeped in the Founding era, is to normalize error as a feature of consequential lives, not an embarrassing footnote. The subtext is historiographical: don’t confuse a usable legend with an accurate human record. He’s signaling a method - judge people in motion, inside their moment, with incomplete information and competing loyalties - rather than treating history as a courtroom where the only verdicts are canonization or cancellation.
The context that makes the sentence land is our appetite for exemplary narratives. We want figures whose lives can be exported as lessons, cleanly. Ellis offers a messier model: success doesn’t immunize you from bad calls; ethical intention doesn’t prevent harm; a life can be “best” by one measure and compromised by another. It’s a spare sentence that smuggles in a whole argument about how to read lives: with admiration, yes, but without the consolations of myth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Joseph
Add to List
