Quotes from H.W. Brands

He made his character his platform.

J.P. Morgan learned to fish in troubled waters.

Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, "This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year.

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.

The audience perked up the more. American conservatives were a combative tribe who didn't speak of liberals as their "friends," but here Reagan did. His tone was serious, but it wasn't angry, the way Goldwater's often was. Reagan criticized Democratic leaders, but he didn't criticize Democrats. He condemned the direction the American government was going, but he professed confidence in the American people.

He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign

In imperial relationships, getting out proves much more complicated than getting in.

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, "I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.

As the golden news spread beyond California to the outside world, it triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. From all over the planet they came—from Mexico and Peru and Chile and Argentina, from Oregon and Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand and China, from the American North and the American South, from Britain and France and Germany and Italy and Greece and Russia.

He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics was more important.

Go on and finish your studies," Gore said. "You are poor enough, but there are greater evils than poverty. Live on no man's favor. What bread you do eat, let it be the bread of independence. Pursue your profession. Make yourself useful to your friends and a little formidable to your enemies, and you have nothing to fear.

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

where the ballot-box, more precious than any work in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered.

It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt

Both sides had more confidence in their opponents' weaknesses than their own strength.

Even when he played, he made a business of it.

Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues.

The reason is that the people know that the Democratic Party is the people's party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.

Fatigue could be the dealmaker's friend.

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one

Warner Studios official in the era of silent movies: Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

Bushes may not be eloquent explaining emotion, but George HW Bush's mother knew enough to be in position with her children were ready to talk. She waited up not just to ensure safety but to make the most of the moment of excited emotions. The next morning, they would congeal into polite, one-word answers.

John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.