Quotes from Ron Chernow

He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math.

Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promulgated belligerent new orders against America's merchant marine. By spring, the French had seized more than three hundred American vessels.

His life was a case study in the profitable use of time.

Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi-War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace, Jefferson benefited from exceptional good fortune as America settled down for the first time since the Revolution.

But you must keep this contract secret even from your wife. When you begin to make more money, don't let anybody know it. Don't put on any more style.

Whatever Hoar's injury, he departed in gentlemanly fashion, sending Grant a gracious farewell note. In private, however, he broadcast his anger and "wished the government might be destroyed.

he was an unusually sober and purposeful young man. In countless letters in later years, he advised young relatives that adolescence was a risky time when evil influences lurked nearby, ready to pounce: "You are now extending into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed. When the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice.

The two sides projected competing nightmares of what would happen if the other side prevailed.

Rockefeller was similarly suspicious of any boasting or ostentation among associates.

It took Rockefeller time to shed his obsessive concern for Standard Oil and allow himself to be lulled by the restful sea spirit.

Comfortable with himself, he needed no outward validation of what he had accomplished.

He became so fond of wigs that he started to wear rotating wigs of different lengths to give the impression of his hair growing then being cut.

1791, the U.S. government granted patents for Parkinson's flax mill, even though he had admitted that they were "improvements upon the mill or machinery . . . in Great Britain."32 Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.

Mr. Adams is vain, suspicious, and stubborn, of an excessive self-regard, taking counsel with nobody."9 Jefferson predicted to Létombe that Adams would last only one term and urged the French to invade England.

the three increasingly clash as they sell competing services.

it was a more auspicious time for an American banker than it had been when Peabody was flogging the hated Maryland bonds in the 1830s.

If roomy and comfortable, it was extremely modest for someone of Rockefeller's wealth and, like his Cleveland residence, subtly masked the size of his fortune.

Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, "It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.

As his body aged, his mind grew younger and more buoyant.

He even had wigs styled for different occasions: golf, church, short walks, and so on.

While Hamilton endeared himself to Washington in this first election, he also antagonized John Adams, a man with an encyclopedic memory for slights.

Washington possessed the outstanding judgment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide his sometimes wayward protégé; he saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand.

Destined to serve seven terms as governor and two as vice president, Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own. As his biographer John Kaminski put it, "George Clinton's friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.

On May 16, 1797, President Adams delivered a bellicose message to Congress, denouncing the French for ejecting Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and stalking American ships and chiding them for having "inflicted a wound in the American breast.