Ron Chernow Quotes

Far more than just a technical document, the Report on Manufactures was a prescient statement of American nationalism.

Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don’t want leaders whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.

For Hamilton, Jefferson’s desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolis...

For Hamilton, his encounters with the two obdurate generals strengthened his preference for strict hierarchy and centralized command as the only way to accomplish things—a view that was to find its po...

For part of his Parisian stay, Jefferson was joined by his two daughters. The younger one, Polly, arrived in 1787 in the company of his light-skinned fourteen-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, who was ca...

For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp, Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, fami...

For this reason, I have stressed his evangelical Baptism as the passkey that unlocks many mysteries of his life.

George Clinton, his future political nemesis.

Grant deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln for what he did for the freed slaves. He got the big issues right during his presidency even if he bungled many of the small...

Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore...

Grant notified the president that he had vacated the office and no longer functioned as war secretary. Faced with this fait accompli, Johnson was furious, believing Grant should have resigned his post...

Grant was peppered with conflicting reports from white Democrats and black Republicans in Mississippi, who seemed to reside on different planets. One white complained to Grant about ignorant

Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, If they break this union, they will break my heart.69 He could have left no more fitting political epitap...

Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality: States, like...

Hamilton hit the ground running: the very next day, he arranged a fifty-thousand-dollar loan for the federal government from the Bank of New York. The day after that, a Sunday, he worked all day at th...

Hamilton seldom published under his own name and drew on a bewildering array of pseudonyms. Such pen names were sometimes transparent masks through which the public readily identified prominent politi...

Hamilton, wanting the bank to remain predominantly in private hands, advanced a theory that became a truism of central banking—that monetary policy was so liable to abuse that it needed some insulatio...

Hamilton’s crowded years as treasury secretary scarcely exhaust the epic story of his short life, which was stuffed with high drama. From his illegitimate birth on Nevis to his bloody downfall in Weeh...

He also saw human nature as insatiably curious and reserved his highest praise for minds that created schemes or systems of truth.11

He cleverly assumed that he was addressing loyal people and made common cause with them: I have come among you, not as an enemy, but as your friend and fellow-citizen, not to injure or annoy you, but...