Quotes from H.W. Brands

Boys, here's where I cash in my chips.[House judiciary committee chairman Hatton Summers(D) to Vice President John Nance Garner about Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to 'pack the court'.]

When Rector Alward came over here to preach an anti-Jewish crusade, after some thought I decided that the best thing to do was to have him protected by forty Jewish policemen.

Proving himself to himself was no small matter.

Andrew Carnegie was an inventor only in the sense that he adopted and adapted the discoveries of others.

Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.

The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.

I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources. Andrew Carnegie

Diplomacy was a long game.

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

1. Destruction of the unity among the Western countries, thereby isolating the United States. 2. Alienating the Western peoples from their governments so that the efforts of the Western countries to strengthen themselves will be undermined.

He adored competing but didn't want you to know he'd ever worked at it.

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.

In the immediate aftermath of the great Chicago fire, a business proprietor erected a shack in front of his burned-out business. On a sign, he placed his name and the tagline that everything was gone but wife, children, and energy.

He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush's parents on his Andover application

It's philanthropy, but it's good politics, too. Mighty good politics. The poor are some of the most grateful people in the world. George Washington Plunkett.

The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.

There was so much – so many tests and tasks, so many tiny referenda.

Reagan is described as delivering Barry Goldwater's doctrine with John F. Kennedy's technique.

Theodore Roosevelt came to Dekota to experience the dying of one age with the slaying of a rare buffalo and the dawning of the West's industrial age.

His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.