Ron Chernow

“In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.”

“The story of Alexander Hamilton lends itself to hip-hop treatment. Hamilton's personality is driven and unrelenting, and the music has that same quality. The music and the man mirror each other.”

“There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.”

“What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They're managing billions, yet they're subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.”

“The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.”

“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.”

“In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.”

“That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.”

“Hamilton had a certain social versatility, and in a way, that is understandable because he's someone who rises up from the lowest rungs of society and then scales the top. And he gets to know people from every strata along the way.”

“I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.”

“Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.”

“The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.”

“It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.”

“When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.”

“If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.”

“The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.”

“And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of the speculators, various tribes of money makers and stock jobbers of all denominations, to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything in one common ruin.”

“Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.”

“Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.”

“Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.”