H.W. Brands

“The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.”

“A live-in domestic worker: "You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.”

“He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind's eye. It was one of the secrets of his military success.”

“He was a generous but subtly demanding boss.”

“I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources. Andrew Carnegie”

“Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, "This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year.”

“Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.”

“Andrew Carnegie was an inventor only in the sense that he adopted and adapted the discoveries of others.”

“In the immediate aftermath of the great Chicago fire, a business proprietor erected a shack in front of his burned-out business. On a sign, he placed his name and the tagline that everything was gone but wife, children, and energy.”

“It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested."[”

“One of George H. W. Bush's early teachers at Andover wrote, "At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.”

“Accustomed to motion, he was forced to be still.”

“He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.”

“Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.”

“Theodore Roosevelt came to Dekota to experience the dying of one age with the slaying of a rare buffalo and the dawning of the West's industrial age.”

“He was a product of a culture where it was generally counterproductive to hold grudges.”

“Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.”

“Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.”

“He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign”

“The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.”