Quotes from Ron Chernow

In March 1780, Congress tried to restore monetary order by issuing one new dollar in exchange for forty old ones, a move that wiped out the savings of many Americans.

I never felt the need of scientific knowledge, have never felt it. A young man who wants to succeed in business does not require chemistry or physics. He can always hire scientists.

Lawrence would function as both a peer and a parental figure for his half brother, and his youthful adventures operated so powerfully on George's imagination that the latter's early life seems to enact a script first drafted by his older brother.

Mr. J.P. he's such a sweetie underneath the sternness

The sudden wealth of young businessmen such as Rockefeller fed envy among returning soldiers, who wished to emulate their good fortune.

Hardly a period of his life was free of illness and depression.

Despite the low price of Russian oil, Standard barred it from America and retained nearly 80 percent of world markets in the late 1880s.

His gifts also reflected his own obsessive concern with longevity.

The sum total of these developments resulted in nothing less than a revolution in medical education.

She liked to quote the maxim, "To be a good wife and mother is the highest and hardest privilege of woman.

may have clung to the Morgan position longer than he wanted to because of its social utility.

The Clarks were the first of many business partners to underrate the audacity of the quietly calculating Rockefeller, who bided his time as he figured out how to get rid of them.

For many in the North, the high drama of preserving the union and emancipating the slaves had exhausted their capacity for altruism, leaving a residual contagion of greed.

The goal was to create a timeless document that would elevate Americans above the partisan sniping that had disfigured public life. Usually the hotheaded one, Hamilton deleted some splenetic lines that Washington had slipped in about newspapers filled "with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics.

What a blessing the oil has been to mankind!

In its thirty-year existence, the GEB dispensed $130 million, equal to more than $1 billion today.

Eliza Hamilton was committed to one holy quest above all others: to rescue her husband's historical reputation from the gross slanders that had tarnished it.

61 Pierpont's fortune didn't approach those of the great industrialists—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, or Harriman—and he didn't quite edge out Jay Gould.

Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal.

Desperately eager to please his parents, he had exhausted himself in trying to scrub sin from his soul.

He is almost exclusively preoccupied with his bodily health, thinking of different medicines, new diets and possibly new doctors!

While keeping apart from the management of the RIMR and the GEB, Rockefeller remained more involved with the University of Chicago.

yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family breadwinners.

Republican ire about the Federalist dominance of the judiciary became especially strident after Adams nominated John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court in late January 1801.