Quotes from Ron Chernow

There was friction in the family regarding Anne Morgan's award of $3 million.

With virtuosic brilliance, Rockefeller and Flagler played these three railroads against each other in seemingly endless permutations.

Rockefeller generally conformed to the requisite style, but his family constantly had to remind him to buy a new suit when his current one got too shiny.

Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities.

While sympathetic to Roosevelt's plea, Morgan lacked the total power over the railroad men

To the young American Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open;

As he ventured timidly beyond the self-contained world of his youth, he could not just enjoy spontaneous pleasure and had to justify it in terms of self-improvement.

A hostile press often spoke of the University as if it were Standard Oil propaganda

It was certainly not their intention, but the trustbusters helped to preserve Rockefeller's legacy for posterity and unquestionably made him the world's richest man.

The man born without honor placed a premium on maintaining his.

Not only had Burr's plan failed to provide pure water but it had thwarted other sound plans afoot, including those for a municipal water company.

Never an intellectual who relished ideas for their own sake, he mined books for practical wisdom and delighted in dredging up handy aphorisms.

After Pierpont Morgan's death, the House of Morgan would become less autocratic, less identified with a single individual. Power would be diffused among several partners, although Jack Morgan would remain as figurehead.

What the American economy needed instead were new cooperative forms (trusts, pools, monopolies) that would restrain grasping individuals for the general good.

Rockefeller never passed up a chance to exploit a legitimate advantage against his beleaguered rivals.

If Rockefeller generally enjoyed excellent health, there were early warning symptoms of the toll taken by the excruciating pressures of Standard Oil.

No longer at the mercy of unpredictable economic forces, he thrived even in recessions.

Though he brushed off his critics as minor irritants and professed faith in his own integrity, it could not have been easy to face such universal opprobrium.

Unlike his father, however, his self-confidence was a fragile bloom, easily crushed.

Few figures in American History have aroused such visceral love or loathing as Alexander Hamilton.

For Hamilton, Jefferson's desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: "Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolish the judges at pleasure destroys the independence of the judicial department and swallows it up in the impetuous vortex of legislative influence?"34 Without an independent judiciary, the Constitution was a worthless document.

What nobody could have foreseen in 1913 was that

In this moralistic frame of mind, he was bound to see his opponents as benighted, misguided people, "governed by their narrow jealousies and unwarranted prejudices

After the agreement fell apart, the disorganized producers lost all incentive to curtail production, feeding another downward spiral in oil prices.