Quotes from Ron Chernow

A sinking fund is a repository, set up apart from the general budget, for revenues to pay off debt.) It would sequester revenues from the sudden whims of grasping politicians who might want to raid the Treasury for short-term gain. The sinking fund would retire about 5 percent of the debt each year until it was paid off.

Julia would gladly have stayed for one more term and had no qualms about scrapping George Washington's precedent. "Oh, Ulys! was that kind to me?" she protested. "Was it just to me?" "Well," he replied, "I do not want to be here another four years. I do not think I could stand it." Rather than feel sympathy for her husband's plight as a profoundly overburdened president, Julia chose to feel "deeply injured.

By a strange coincidence, they looked so much alike that everybody assumed they were biological sisters.

With finely honed political instincts, George Clinton saw that Hamilton was overreaching, and he secretly aided King's candidacy in order to drive a wedge between the Schuylers and the Livingstons. When New York picked its second senator on July 16, 1789, Rufus King came out on top. Just as Clinton suspected, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston was irate and gradually moved into the governor's camp.

While here, Grant goes out to the very front, is under fire for hours together, and at the same time he receives despatches from Sherman a thousand miles away, and directs the movements of his army at Atlanta, of another in Louisiana, of the forces at Mobile; and smokes his cigar in calm and quiet all the while," he informed Edwin Booth.

Both Hamilton and Madison were rational men who assumed that people often acted irrationally because of ambition and avarice. Madison wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

We will let it simmer" was a saying John employed throughout his business career.

It was a self-indulgence on a magnificent scale, and a source of great anxiety and at times weakness to his firm, which could well have used the money as capital in the business if he had not spent it so lavishly.

A fidgety silence was always Rockefeller's harshest expression of scorn.

Standard merely had to dump oil at cost to stamp out competitors.

in April, the president-elect had stopped at Morris's opulent residence. "The treasury, Morris, will of course be your berth," Washington confided. "After your invaluable services as financier of the Revolution, no one can pretend to contest the office of the secretary of the treasury with you.

George Washington always demonstrated a capacity to learn from missteps. "Errors once discovered are more than half amended," he liked to say. "Some men will gain as much experience in the course of three or four years as some will in ten or a dozen.

One is left to wonder whether Bill saw in Johnston a substitute son who might fill the large emotional void left by his formerly adoring eldest son.

Citing private reasons—Morris was already lurching down a long, slippery path that led to bankruptcy and debtors' prison—Morris politely declined the offer.

At another point, they met an old man in the roadway whom John so sedulously drained of local lore that the latter finally pleaded with weary resignation, "For God's sake if you will go with me over to that barn yonder, I will start and tell you everything I ever knew."72 This was the same monotonously inquisitive young man who was known as "the Sponge" in the Oil Regions.

I warned him many times. I warned him in words, in deed and in every possible way.

Pierpont handled the West Shore affair better than I could have done it myself.

Amid the hectic rounds of his life, Rockefeller always found time to send letters and small, thoughtful gifts to Packard and Giles to buck up their morale.

We realized that public sentiment would be against us if we actually refined all the oil.

Rockefeller decided he had had enough.

Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you

As he abandoned his fearful attitude toward the press, he loosened up, as if liberated by the change.

so stingy with compliments

Perhaps it was from Lucy that he inherited the fascination with medicine that ran through his life, right up to his creation of the world's preeminent medical-research institute.