Quotes from Bryan Burrough

Of the 1,800 people living in Austin's colony in 1825, one in four was enslaved.7

Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it. —Stephen F. Austin, 1832

The Alamo, long used in a myth that demonized and gaslit Mexican-Americans and Indigenous people, might as well be a Confederate monument in the minds of conservative adherents to the Heroic Anglo Narrative.

By 1932 his debt had grown to more than four million dollars, far more than his net worth. "Aren't you concerned about owing all this money you can't pay?" Ernest Closuit asked him. "No," Murchison said with a smile. "If you're gonna owe money, owe more than you can pay, then the people can't afford to foreclose.

History is written by the victors, they say, and there was no one alive who would come forward to dispute Hoover's fabricated story. Never mind that there was no indication whatsoever in Bureau files that Ma Barker had ever fired a gun, robbed a bank, or done anything more criminal than live off her sons' ill-gotten gains.

Art has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve.

Recognize that ultimate success comes from opportunistic, bold moves which, by definition, cannot be planned.

The minute you establish an organization, it starts to decay.

He who's not busy being born is busy dying." Tony

an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility.

Planning, gentlemen, is 'What are you going to do next year that's different from what you did this year?'" he told them. "All I want is five items.

But there was no denying Purvis's ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He'd had his car stolen from in front of his house.

Everyone has the seventh-grade story where, you know, they make the field trip and then all the white kids start treating them differently," says Ruben Cordova, a San Antonio art historian. "Davy Crockett's [death], it's sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you're looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.

The Roaring Eighties were a new gilded age, where winning was celebrated at all costs.

Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. "Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?" Hurt asked at one point. "I can tell you," Karpis said. "How do you know where it is?" asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover. "We were thinking of robbing it," Karpis said.

Through all the machismo, through all the greed, through all the discussion of shareholder values, it all came down to this: John Gutfreund and Tom Strauss were prepared to scrap the largest takeover of all time because their firm's name would go on the right side, not the left side, of a tombstone advertisement buried among the stock tables at the back of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

It is important to remember that, as Ken Auletta wrote in his definitive Greed and Glory on Wall Street, "no reporter can with 100 percent accuracy re-create events that occurred some time before. Memories play tricks on participants, the more so when the outcome has become clear. A reporter tries to guard against inaccuracies by checking with a variety of sources, but it is useful for a reader—and an author—to be humbled by this journalistic limitation.

The first recorded U.S. bank robbery, actually a nighttime burglary, came in 1831, when a man named Edward Smith snuck into a Wall Street bank and made off with $245,000. He was caught and sentenced to a five-year term in Sing Sing.

Something had to be done fast. A letter: that was the answer. As many lawyers do when nursing a grievance, Nusbaum knew it was important to get their anger down into writing. As Cohen and the investment bankers shouted and cursed around him, he began dictating

Let us pause for a moment to consider the irony of a Mexican government determined to stop the flow of illegal American immigrants. You just have to relish it. The only thing missing is a Mexican president promising to build a wall.

I know the name of your seventh-grade Texas History teacher." When the Texan expresses skepticism that this could be possible, you smile and say, "Coach.

Hoover viewed the Dillinger case as a potential quagmire and long resisted being drawn into it.

Hands up! Hands up! Everybody on the floor!" The effect was akin to three wild-eyed berserkers storming a prayer meeting.

From the beginning, the prospect of American settlements in Texas was entirely dependent on slavery. It was no secret. Everyone knew it. Austin would say it over and over and over: The only reason Americans would come to Texas was to farm cotton, and they would not do that without slaves. They really didn't know any other way.