Top 280 Ron Chernow Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Ron Chernow

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Ron Chernow

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Ron Chernow

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

— Ron Chernow

116. “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

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

— Ron Chernow

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Where Jefferson dismissed these wholesale killings as regrettable but necessary sacrifices to freedom, Hamilton was traumatized by them. The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in him religious feelings that had lain dormant since King’s College days.”

— Ron Chernow

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Ron Chernow

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Ron Chernow

137. “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

138. “Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker and excise officer issued a resounding call for American independence that sold a stupendous 120,000 copies by year’s end.”

— Ron Chernow

139. “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

140. “As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.”

— Ron Chernow

141. “While Grant was celebrated as a victorious wartime general and the president who had peacefully settled the Alabama claims, most gratifying to him was being honored as the protector of freed people. A delegation of painters marched by, hoisting a picture that depicted the shackles of slavery being struck off beside the words “Welcome to the Liberator.”

— Ron Chernow

142. “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

143. “He generally spoke with much animation and energy, and with considerable gesture. His mind was filled with all the learning and precedence required for the occasion, enabling him to make numerous extemporaneous speeches. He seduced the listeners with hope and provoked them with fear, leading one spectator to comment that “Hamilton’s harangues combine the poignancy of vinegar with the smoothness of oil.”

— Ron Chernow

144. “The prolific Hamilton was now writing pseudonymous commentaries on his own pseudonymous essays.”

— Ron Chernow

145. “It was probably at this point that a pregnant Eliza first smiled and shook hands with her husband’s future executioner.”

— Ron Chernow

146. “Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.”

— Ron Chernow

147. “In February 1866, he testified before Congress to oppose suffrage for former slaves: “My own opinion is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagoguism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways.”

— Ron Chernow

148. “When he sent a defiant annual message to Congress in early December, it polarized the situation even further. He accused Congress of burdening southern states with black voting rights even though blacks had demonstrated little capacity for government and “wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”27 This message claimed the dubious distinction of being the most racist such message ever penned by an American president.”

— Ron Chernow

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

— Ron Chernow

150. “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