Quotes from Ron Chernow

Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses.

Once Morris had finished his speech, the casket was transferred to a grave site in the Trinity churchyard, not far from where Hamilton had studied and lived, practiced law and served his country.

giving him more generous sympathy than he received in return, although the relationship would become somewhat more equal toward the end of Pierpont's life.

Goldman, Sachs specialized in commercial paper, Lehman in commodity trading.

However, he was persistent, which pleased or displeased people according to taste.

Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country," he wailed to John Jay.

Even though he terminated relations with this pair, he could not dispose of their sour investments so easily and thought the most prudent course was to buy total control of the companies and turn them around.

In the standard telling of his life, Hamilton boards a ship in October 1772 and sails off to North America forever.

Like Twain, Walt Whitman was mesmerized by Grant and grouped him with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the quartet of greatest Americans. "In all Homer and Shakespeare there is no fortune or personality really more picturesque or rapidly changing, more full of heroism, pathos, contrast," he wrote.

There certainly are some drawbacks to belonging to a busy man no matter how fine he may be as I believe you have sometimes found out.48

By an exquisite (and, for Bill, surely excruciating) irony, this scheming, selfish, money-mad charlatan turned his back on his family just as his eldest son began to amass the largest fortune in history.

The committees encouraged rivalry among local units by circulating performance figures and encouraging them to compete for records and prizes.

Profiting from the Rockefeller tie, the Equitable Trust became within a decade America's eighth-largest bank.

The certificate of deposit was more difficult to trace than a check and was the instrument of choice for political bribery.

prone to sudden mood swings.

It was the same act of ventriloquism: the State Department talked, and Tom Lamont moved his lips.

Yet Gates was groomed by Rockefeller, and if he was granted a large measure of freedom, it was partly because Rockefeller had trained him as his proxy.

Rockefeller also derived a glandular pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery.

It is agreed on all hands that he is handsome, his features are good, his eye is not only sprightly and expressive, but it is full of benignity. His attitude in sitting is by connoisseurs esteemed graceful and he has a method of waving his hand that announces the future orator. He stands however rather awkwardly and his legs have not all the delicate slimness of his father's. . . . If he has any fault in manners, he laughs too much.

Please ask for payments as needed from time to time, not all at once.

For Hamilton, his encounters with the two obdurate generals strengthened his preference for strict hierarchy and centralized command as the only way to accomplish things—a view that was to find its political equivalent in his preference for concentrated federal power instead of authority dispersed among the states.

Davison had an uncanny gift in sensing the proper moment for changing the topic, for giving the discussion a timely new turn, thus avoiding a clash or deadlock.

But if John nursed vengeful feelings toward Bill, it must have been secretly gratifying to him that his father left at the very dawn of his triumph and forfeited any claim to his wealth.

Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence.