H. W. Brands

“Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it's what they persuade Congress to do.”

“The candidate who promises the most has the best chance of winning.”

“The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.”

“If you wanted to, you could write history in Haiku.”

“If - heaven forbid - a shooter did come into my class, I wouldn't want to have to worry about getting caught in a crossfire.”

“When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things.”

“Reagan's enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan's value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.”

“The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.”

“People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.”

“Americans knock themselves out, especially since 9/11, praising the military.”

“Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.”

“On style points alone, Donald Trump makes GWB look magnificently presidential.”

“To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century.”

“By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.”

“The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.”

“I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days.”

“You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.”

“People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don't buy studies of presidencies.”

“When people think of the oil industry, they think of Rockefeller, much like when people think of the software industry, they think of Bill Gates.”

“It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.”