Quotes from Ron Chernow

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.

Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)

Hamilton, the human word machine

The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained

Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed" and "A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.

In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.

If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.

Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.

After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.

A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.)

Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel.

Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, 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.

He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that "no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false." If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end "that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.

Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America's potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.

If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.

Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.

Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good.

As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.

Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things Ã¢â'¬Â¦ fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?

Many mickles make a muckle.

It was, Eliza Hamilton Holly noted pointedly, the imperative duty that Eliza had bequeathed to all her children: Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.