Quotes from Ron Chernow

One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital.

Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.

Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.

I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson's masterly saga, 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'

I just have been so surprised and delighted with what has happened with 'Hamilton.' It really has been one of the most enchanting experiences of my life.

A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.

The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.

You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.

Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.

You know the opinion I entertain of mankind and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You s[hould] not have taken advantage of my sensibility to ste[al] into my affections without my consent.

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee," he once said, "and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully.

Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, 'Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won't damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won't put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.

Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all the way along.

Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don't want leaders "whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.