Top 280 Ron Chernow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you’re a financial genius.”

— Ron Chernow

2. “Many mickles make a muckle.”

— Ron Chernow

3. “After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.”

— Ron Chernow

4. “Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.”

— Ron Chernow

5. “Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel.”

— Ron Chernow

6. “The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis.”

— Ron Chernow

7. “A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.”

— Ron Chernow

8. “One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It’s your window into a very large world.”

— Ron Chernow

9. “That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.”

— Ron Chernow

10. “When someone asked if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.”

— Ron Chernow

11. “Mutual funds give people the sense that they’re investing with the big boys and that they’re really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.”

— Ron Chernow

12. “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

— Ron Chernow

13. “He downplayed the significance of technical knowledge in business. “I never felt the need of scientific knowledge, have never felt it. A young man who wants to succeed in business does not require chemistry or physics. He can always hire scientists.”32.”

— Ron Chernow

14. “I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.”

— Ron Chernow

15. “Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won’t have any future.”

— Ron Chernow

16. “One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen “conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!” 16.”

— Ron Chernow

17. “In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.”

— Ron Chernow

18. “Willful waste makes woeful want.”

— Ron Chernow

19. “After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.”

— Ron Chernow

20. “Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”

— Ron Chernow

21. “In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.”

— Ron Chernow

22. “Since Hamilton’s abiding literary sin was prolixity, the time and length constraints imposed by The Federalist may have given a salutary concision to his writing. For.”

— Ron Chernow

23. “To deal with the legions of dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed the creation of a national military cemetery, surrounding the former Lee mansion at Arlington, and Stanton approved the measure the same day.”

— Ron Chernow

24. “Such is my opinion of your abilities as a critic,” Hamilton addressed him directly, “that I very much prefer your disapprobation to your applause.”

— Ron Chernow

25. “In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.”

— Ron Chernow

26. “Franklin wanted a unicameral legislature and an executive council in lieu of a president. He also opposed a presidential veto on legislation, thinking it would lead to executive corruption “till it ends in monarchy.”

— Ron Chernow

27. “Mr. Monroe, if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”

— Ron Chernow

28. “Daring in design, cautious in execution – it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.”

— Ron Chernow

29. “It was, Eliza Hamilton Holly noted pointedly, the imperative duty that Eliza had bequeathed to all her children: Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.”

— Ron Chernow

30. “Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures he detested most in history, he shot back, “Napoleon and Robespierre.”114.”

— Ron Chernow

31. “Ah, this is the constitution,” he said. “Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.”8.”

— Ron Chernow

32. “As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”

— Ron Chernow

33. “In mid-May, he dictated a message for a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic that had a touching, patriarchal tone: “Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again, nor hear my voice, but they are engraved on my heart, and I love them as my children.”

— Ron Chernow

34. “Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”

— Ron Chernow

35. “The British were unhinged by the colonists’ unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen ’conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!”

— Ron Chernow

36. “I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don’t talk back, they don’t sue, and they don’t have angry relatives.”

— Ron Chernow

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that’s spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.”

— Ron Chernow

38. “The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don’t necessarily offer safety and diversification.”

— Ron Chernow

39. “Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.”

— Ron Chernow

40. “Out of the blue, a veteran named Charles Wood, manager of a brush factory in upstate New York, sent Grant a $500 check and offered him a $1,000 interest-free loan for a year, renewable if necessary. Grant accepted this charity with everlasting relief. In his note, Wood tipped his hat to Grant by saying the payment was “for services ending about April 1865.”77.”

— Ron Chernow

41. “With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence.”

— Ron Chernow

42. “A journalist named C. E. Meade, a nephew of George Gordon Meade, claimed Grant puffed on his last cigar while visiting a horse farm in Goshen, New York. “Gentlemen,” Grant announced to his companions, “this is the last cigar I shall ever smoke.”

— Ron Chernow

43. “As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that “every hour misspent is lost forever” and that “future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life.”15.”

— Ron Chernow

44. “The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.”

— Ron Chernow

45. “BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. “When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to pieces,” Johns Adams later wrote, having presided over just such a situation as president.”

— Ron Chernow

46. “Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.”

— Ron Chernow

47. “Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully.”

— Ron Chernow

48. “The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No etiquette had yet evolved to define the legitimate boundaries of dissent. Poison-pen artists on both sides wrote vitriolic essays that were overly partisan, often paid scant heed to accuracy, and sought visceral impact.”

— Ron Chernow

49. “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 insulation from interfering politicians: “To attach full confidence to an institution of this nature, it appears to be an essential ingredient in its structure that it shall be under a private not a public direction, under the guidance of individual interest, not of public policy.” 18 At.”

— Ron Chernow

50. “If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.”

— Ron Chernow