Quotes from Ron Chernow

As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.

I felt blessed by the existence of Horace Porter's 'Campaigning With Grant.'

I'm disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: Liberty, justice, freedom, and tolerance.

Hamilton was extremely combative. Not only was he combative, but he also overreacted to anything he perceived as a threat or a criticism.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.

With any piece of writing, you're hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does.

In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that's the last thing I would have expected.

I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.

In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.

It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.

Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.

As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.

I'm sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.

There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.

Politics boils down to the stories we tell ourselves. And unfortunately, we tell ourselves different stories.

What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They're managing billions, yet they're subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.