Quotes from H. W. Brands

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.

I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.

Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.

Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost.

When the Constitution was written in 1787, there was this supposition that American politics would be above party. The people who would staff the positions in government would have the interests of the country, or at least their states and congressional districts, at heart, and so they wouldn't form permanent political parties.

I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

Once you become president, you don't even have to stop for red lights. And if it looks like traffic's too bad, you just take a helicopter.

I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.

For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.

The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress.

Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.

It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected.

I'm more inclined to say the presidency has changed Trump rather than Trump changed the presidency. He has moderated or reversed himself on most of the positions he took as a candidate. Reality has set in, as it does with every new president.

In some ways, I would be absolutely fascinated if Trump gets elected.

When people think of the oil industry, they think of Rockefeller, much like when people think of the software industry, they think of Bill Gates.

A president can start a war under relatively specious circumstances, and once American soldiers are under fire, Americans will support the soldiers and support the president.

It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.

Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.

The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.

Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'

George W. Bush has shown himself to be a decent guy, not exploiting his former office to make top dollars giving speeches.

When you're actually president, the spin matters a lot less.