Quotes from Ron Chernow

He was the embodiment of power and purpose.

Are you going to let this money puff you up? Keep your eyes open. Don't lose your balance.

Since he never owned more than a third of his company, he needed the cooperation of other people.

But he was so inundated with pleas that many more people were spurned than saved, generating unavoidable bitterness.

Some of Washington's religious style probably reflected an Enlightenment discomfort with religious dogma, but it also reflected his low-key personal style. He was sober and temperate in all things, distrusted zealotry, and would never have talked of hellfire or damnation. He would have shunned anything, such as communion, that might flaunt his religiosity. He never wanted to make a spectacle of his faith or trade on it as a politician.

He sometimes represented poor people in criminal cases on a pro bono basis or was paid with just a barrel of ham.

In the late spring of 1777, Hamilton began the most intimate friendship of his life, with an elegant, blue-eyed young officer named John Laurens, who formally joined Washington's family in October.

Or perhaps Bill just wanted to be spared the inconvenience of doing it himself.

Had Rockefeller not feared his own capacity for excess, he wouldn't have engaged in such strenuous introspection.

its chief draftsman, Morris shrank the original twenty-three articles to seven and wrote the great preamble with its ringing opening, "We the People of the United States." Paying tribute to Morris's craftsmanship, Madison wrote, "The finish given to the style and arrangement fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.

Having created an empire of unfathomable complexity, he was smart enough to see that he had to submerge his identity in the organization.

To Rockefeller, the least imaginative use of money was to give it to people outright instead of delving into the causes of human misery.

For this reason, he never used his wealth to alleviate poverty directly and scorned any charity that smacked of social welfare.

when Archbold took control in the mid-1890s, he kept domestic prices high while depressing foreign prices to diminish overseas competition.

When he dozed during an emergency meeting, nobody dared disturb the royal snooze.

Throughout his life, Rockefeller was wounded deeply by accusations that he was a cold, malignant personality.

April 1776, Benjamin Franklin expressed pleasure "with the ease and affability with which we were treated and the lively behaviour of the young ladies.

Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

On September 17, 1787, after almost four months of hard-fought battles, the convention ended when thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution

They knew they would either have to quit the business or swallow their pride and make peace with the oil giant.

because we don't have to talk. Often we sit fifteen minutes in silence before one of us breaks it!

Meanwhile, Jack's intimate life remained confined to his mother.

With a second-string cabinet of Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry, Washington had purged it of apostasy but had also exchanged creative ferment for mediocrity; the numerous rejections had given him little choice.

More than one person who was refused later accused Rockefeller of having ruined him.