Quotes from Ron Chernow

Father was never willing to pay a bill which he did not know to be correct in all its items.

And in the Senate, Oliver Ellsworth took the lead in drafting a judiciary act that provided for a six-member Supreme Court, buttressed by federal district and circuit courts.

It was deeply ironic that Rockefeller retained such residual faith in homeopathy even as he financed the world's most sophisticated medical-research operation.

Hamilton's achievements were never matched because he was present at the government's inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

The lawmakers were drawn to the courtroom by more than curiosity: they had under consideration a bill that would allow truth as a defense in libel trials.

Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle.

As Rockefeller feared, the Duluth jury reached a verdict in favor of the Merritts, though it was overturned on appeal.

This was a corner, a bloody trap for speculators.

The cash-strapped Scott didn't simply agree to stop refining oil but offered Standard Oil a huge fire sale of assets—refineries, storage tanks, pipelines, a fleet of steamships, tugboats, barges, loading docks—in fact, far more than Standard could afford.

Though Rockefeller resisted the yacht-owning fad that swept New York society in the 1880s and owned neither a boat nor private railroad car, he spared no expense for fast-trotting horses

On May 19, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, Hamilton's old patron from Elizabethtown, proposed that Congress establish a department of finance.

While Rockefeller and Gates were irked by the Merritts' ingratitude, they were not entirely blameless.

On October 15, Adams yielded grudgingly to the appointment of Hamilton as inspector general. Knox refused to serve under him, but Charles Cotesworth Pinckney agreed and praised Hamilton. "I knew that his talents in war were great," he told McHenry, "that he had a genius capable of forming an extensive military plan, and a spirit courageous and enterprizing, equal to the execution of it.

The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December.

To have high-volume, low-cost production, the Standard needed huge guaranteed sales.

Even as a young man, Rockefeller was extremely composed in a crisis. In this respect, he was a natural leader: The more agitated others became, the calmer he grew.

Gates had to take account of the many things that Rockefeller had ruled off-limits, such as funding social-welfare agencies.

a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent

She never entirely recuperated.

Each side possessed a lurid, distorted view of the other, buttressed by an idealized sense of itself.

With John Adams certain to run strongly in New England and Thomas Jefferson equally so in the south, the election would hinge on pivotal votes in the mid-Atlantic states, particularly New York, which had twelve electoral votes.

Then it dropped 400 points on a single trade.

Although these money-losing ships drained him for years, their purchase was dictated by the larger interest of Standard Oil, and he never regretted his snap decision.

This was Alexander Hamilton's recurring nightmare: an electoral deal struck between Virginia and New York Republicans.