H. W. Brands

“When you're actually president, the spin matters a lot less.”

“Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.”

“For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.”

“The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.”

“Abraham Lincoln spoke out against the Mexican War. But once Americans were under fire, people who were on the fence felt obliged to support it.”

“When the Constitution was written in 1787, there was this supposition that American politics would be above party. The people who would staff the positions in government would have the interests of the country, or at least their states and congressional districts, at heart, and so they wouldn't form permanent political parties.”

“In the early 19th to the early 20th century, people had a lot of things wrong with them. Doctors didn't know how to fix them, and so they lived with them.”

“Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments.”

“Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.”

“I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try.”

“Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.”

“If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign.”

“The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.”

“The Tea Party loves Reagan because he said exactly what they want to hear.”

“With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.”

“When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader.”

“In some ways, I would be absolutely fascinated if Trump gets elected.”

“Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.”

“I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.”

“There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.”