Top 280 Ron Chernow Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Even amid a state of open warfare, these law-abiding men felt obligated to issue a formal document, giving a dispassionate list of their reasons for secession.”

— Ron Chernow

102. “Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won’t see until the bear market comes.”

— Ron Chernow

103. “Burr is said to have remarked, “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”61.”

— Ron Chernow

104. “Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.”

— Ron Chernow

105. “Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.”

— Ron Chernow

106. “It was not an assembly of dogmatic extremists who sat in Windsor chairs for six weeks in the red-and-black brick structure known as Carpenters’ Hall. Far from being bent on fighting for independence, these law-abiding delegates offered up a public prayer that war might be averted. They.”

— Ron Chernow

107. “At the time, Charles Sumner still chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made preposterous demands upon the English. Not only did he want all of Canada but a total British withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, including its Caribbean islands and the Falkland Islands off the Argentine coast.”

— Ron Chernow

108. “Finally, he flung his hat on the ground in disgust and fumed, “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?”

— Ron Chernow

109. “One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, “We forgot.”

— Ron Chernow

110. “The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.”

— Ron Chernow

111. “Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably.”

— Ron Chernow

112. “Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.”

— Ron Chernow

113. “Since critics found it hard to defeat him on intellectual grounds, they stooped to personal attacks.”

— Ron Chernow

114. “At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman republic, this was also a clever label, insinuating that Federalists were not real republicans and hence must be monarchists. Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers.”

— Ron Chernow

115. “He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’s lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order. The.”

— Ron Chernow

116. “In public exigencies, there is hardly anything more prejudicial than excessive caution, timidity and dilatoriness, as there is nothing more beneficial than vigour, enterprise and expedition.”

— Ron Chernow

117. “There is no country in the world where it’s as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.”

— Ron Chernow

118. “Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.”

— Ron Chernow

119. “While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin. He would have been crestfallen to know that, for some high-ranking folks in London, his behavior only confirmed that.”

— Ron Chernow

120. “A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.”

— Ron Chernow

121. “The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.”

— Ron Chernow

122. “Washington and other founders entertained the fanciful hope that America would be spared the bane of political parties, which they called “factions” and associated with parochial self-interest.”

— Ron Chernow

123. “The four to six young aides usually slept in one room, often two to a bed, then worked long days in a single room with chairs crowded around small wooden tables. Washington typically kept a small office off to the side. During busy periods, the aides sometimes wrote and copied one hundred letters per day, an exhausting grind.”

— Ron Chernow

124. “In “the general course of things, the popular views and even prejudices will direct the action of the rulers.”

— Ron Chernow

125. “In Venice, Grant let slip a remark that would provide fodder for many satirists: he told a young woman what a fine city it would be if only the canals were drained. Henry Adams adduced this as damning evidence of Grant’s philistine nature, but he may only have meant that the canals should be cleansed of sewage.”

— Ron Chernow

126. “Grant’s postwar fame didn’t spare him the bane of his father-in-law’s glaring presence. After he and Julia settled into their Georgetown home, Colonel Dent had no qualms about moving in with them, forcing the victorious Union general to tolerate under his roof a cranky, unrepentant rebel who pontificated about the North violating southern rights.”

— Ron Chernow

127. “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.”

— Ron Chernow

128. “Madison did not want a long-term government debt, fearing that such securities would fall into foreign hands: “As they have more money than the Americans and less productive ways of laying it out, they can and will pretty generally buy out the Americans.”

— Ron Chernow

129. “To survive, he continued to hawk firewood on the St. Louis streets and the time thus spent destroyed any chance of prospering as a farmer: “I regard every load of wood taken, when the services of both myself and team are required on the farm, is a direct loss of more than the value of the load.”114.”

— Ron Chernow

130. “Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.”

— Ron Chernow

131. “In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if “the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble” maintained such open defiance of authority. 13.”

— Ron Chernow

132. “Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.”

— Ron Chernow

133. “Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.”

— Ron Chernow

134. “Clearly, this ambivalent twenty-year-old favored the Revolution but also worried about the long-term effect of habitual disorder, especially among the uneducated masses. Hamilton lacked the temperament of a true-blue revolutionary. He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’s lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order.”

— Ron Chernow

135. “Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all the way along.”

— Ron Chernow

136. “He had a great general’s ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. “You can abuse me, you can strike me,” Rockefeller said, “so long as you let me have my own way.”

— Ron Chernow

137. “The tone of politics had rapidly grown very harsh. Some poison was released into the American political atmosphere that was not put back into the bottle for a generation. As after any revolution, purists were vigilant for signs of ideological backsliding and departures from the one true faith.”

— Ron Chernow

138. “It turned out that before he had stalked Garfield, Charles Guiteau had stalked Grant.”

— Ron Chernow

139. “The power of the new mass media made Grant’s illness a national spectacle, with his doctors offering twice-daily updates on his condition.”

— Ron Chernow

140. “Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own.”

— Ron Chernow

141. “Greeley campaigned from the back of a train, delivering scores of speeches and previewing the whistle-stop style that later marked presidential campaigns. His campaign stumbled from the start and never found a secure footing. He was kept busy explaining his history of derogatory statements about Democrats. “I never said all Democrats were saloon keepers,” he protested. “What I said was that all saloon keepers were Democrats.”

— Ron Chernow

142. “With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world,” he protested, Mexico “has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible.”

— Ron Chernow

143. “Washington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as “my boy.”

— Ron Chernow

144. “If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: “I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, danger to liberty etc. etc. I would endeavour to prostrate the national government, raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.” He denied.”

— Ron Chernow

145. “It is unclear how closely Grant followed current affairs as the national debate over slavery broadened and intensified. Through the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted as a free state while other territories wrested from Mexico were left free to adopt slavery or not. In exchange, the North appeased the South by submitting to a strict new fugitive slave law that made many northerners feel like accomplices in the hated institution of their southern brethren.”

— Ron Chernow

146. “In his early days in business, Rockefeller often suffered from severe neck pains that might have indicated stress on the job, and he turned to horses as a therapeutic diversion. “I would leave my office in the afternoon and drive a pair of fast horses as hard as they could go: trot, break, gallop – everything.”4.”

— Ron Chernow

147. “If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.”

— Ron Chernow

148. “Growing up as a miniature adult, burdened with duties, he developed an exaggerated sense of responsibility that would be evident throughout his life.”

— Ron Chernow

149. “The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don’t perform.”

— Ron Chernow

150. “They profess to aim only at a reform of the constitution and of certain abuses in the public administration, but an abolition of debts public and private and a new division of property are strongly suspected in contemplation.”

— Ron Chernow