Quotes from T.J. Stiles

If he had learned anything from his parents, he learned that business was a matter of relationships.

He did have his beliefs, chiefly in his own genius.

Thanks in large part to reduced transportation costs, San Francisco matured from a dust-blown, mud-lined tent camp with gambling saloons into a brick-walled, warehouse-filled commercial center with gambling saloons.

Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

IT IS AS IF WE ALL CARRY in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors," writes V. S. Naipaul,

The last word about the Little Bighorn belongs to perhaps Custer's most insightful chronicler, Robert Utley. "The simplest answer, usually overlooked, is that the army lost largely because the Indians won," he writes. "To ascribe defeat entirely to military failings is to devalue Indian strength and leadership." The invasion of the Black Hills and the order to abandon the unceded lands galvanized the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes.

If he had been able to sell all his assets at full market value at the moment of his death, in January of that year, he would have taken one out of every twenty dollars in circulation, including cash and demand deposits.2

Confrontation was the stuff of daily life.

Americans from other regions, she wrote, described them "as sly, grinding, selfish, and tricking. The Yankees… will avow these qualities themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on earth can match them at over-reaching in a bargain." It was a curious kind of vanity, she observed; if you listened to a Yankee describe himself, "you might fancy him a god—though a tricky one.

Perhaps nothing destroys a political system more quickly and efficiently than paranoia. The situation can be grave enough when one party to a quarrel believes the worst of the other, when it pictures its opponents as conspirators. But when both sides see the other as ruthless, treacherous, and unwilling to abide by the rules, then all room for compromise disappears.

Under standing orders from General Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia enslaved any and all black persons it could seize—in Virginia, Maryland, even Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign. It made no distinctions between those who had escaped during the war, those born free, or those freed before the war under the laws of Southern states. If they were black, the men in gray took them as property.

The prosperity of a nation's commerce cannot be durable, unless it be founded upon a solid basis," Rochefoucauld-Liancourt warned; "and the solid basis of a nation's commerce is the produce of its soil, of its manufactures.

From New York they traveled on to Washington, a swamp village by comparison. In

When Ulysses S. Grant took the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1869, the nation that emerged out of the Civil War approached maturity—or what we might call its first maturity. All that was "appointed from of old" seemed to disappear.

The speed of transportation largely determined the speed of information.

He may have confused honor with with with ruthlessness.

What distinguished him in a moment of crisis was his self-command.