Quotes from Justin Kaplan

There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence [in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations]. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.

Was there ever an undertaking of more merit, of more hazard and more enterprising," he is supposed to have written soon after the collapse of his Pacific Fur Company

William's money, purpose, and pride eventually prevailed over all the resistance and resentment he provoked. He could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.

BY THE 1890s the Astor estate, comprising the assets of both cousins, was worth about $200 million. In the 1930s the historian Burton J. Hendrick called it "the world's greatest monument to unearned increment…a first mortgage on Fate itself.

By February 1930 Henry Hardenbergh's great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled. Its two-acre site, where the parents of the Astor cousins once dwelt in their brownstone mansions, was cleared for another architectural milestone, the 102-story Empire State Building.

the Waldorf-Astoria crystallized the improbable and fabulous. It was more than a mere hotel. It was a vast, glittering, iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new idea—the aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.

Duke of Buckingham, a sometime favorite of King Charles II and famously satirized by poet laureate John Dryden: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long: But in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.

He demanded from his guests inflexible conformity to schedule, decreeing, for example, precisely when they should write their letters, stroll about the grounds, or ride into the village

The population of Manhattan jumped from about twenty-five thousand in 1780, when Astor arrived there, to about five hundred thousand in 1848, the year he died.

In 1828 Broadway, the city's spinal thoroughfare, ended at Tenth Street, according to the grid plan for the city streets. Forty years later Broadway extended northward to 155th Street and beyond that into the Bronx. Only the three rivers that enclosed Manhattan could limit its horizontal growth.

A child of the new age of iron, steam, and mechanical wonders, the architect, Isaiah Rogers, virtually invented the modern hotel: a functionally complex and self-contained structure (and social organization) that was a sort of human terrarium. A closed world designed from the ground up for the specific purpose of welcoming, housing, maintaining, and feeding guests in advanced comfort, the hotel was no longer just a stop along the way: it was a destination in itself