Quotes from Ron Chernow

Keeping up the pose of indifference must have taken its own toll.

A man of irreproachable integrity, Hamilton severed all outside sources of income while in office, something that neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison dared to do.

Generalized alopecia, or total loss of body hair, has been attributed to many causes, ranging from genetic factors to severe stress, but remarkably little is known for certain.

At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.

He was solemn and businesslike and always master of his emotions.

His victory over the Cleveland refiners would be the first but also the most controversial campaign of his career.

At first, Rockefeller swallowed his anger and stoically endured this injustice.

Rockefeller developed an inverted worldview, accusing his critics of exactly the same sins of which they accused him.

Starting in the 1880s, he adopted a policy of never doing business with strangers or even meeting them, avoiding unwanted solicitations and controversy.

What really disturbed him was not so much making money but spending it.

For Rockefeller, the onset of the disease coincided with his breakdown of the early 1890s.

Then, on September 1, 1802, Callender broke a story that he had learned about in jail and that was to reverberate down through American history: Jefferson's scandalous romance with Sally Hemings: "It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . . By this wench Sally, our President has had several children.

Thinking the move suicidal, Grant believed the South would stop short of the "awful leap" of secession.

He tried almost from the beginning of our partnership to dominate and override me," he said of Clark.

By early 1873, he had crossed his own Rubicon and never looked back.

Such luxury was not their usual style.

My change is five cents short," Rockefeller declared.

The whole dismal parade of career hacks and self-promoting political generals on the Union side had been weeded out, giving way to a new fighting breed.

Each year, Rockefeller reluctantly gave another million dollars to bolster the permanent endowment to keep pace with his free-spending president

Rockefeller denigrated his critics as blackmailers, sharpsters, and crooks. He was now dangerously impervious to criticism.

Big Bill's interest in medicine, conventional and otherwise, began to surface in his son and became more pronounced with time.

He was now a master puppeteer, adroitly manipulating his marionettes, with the strings artfully concealed.

John's moustache began to fall out, and all the hair on his body had followed by August.

He also excelled as a debater, demonstrating that beneath his reserved manner he could articulate his thoughts forcefully.