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  1. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence."
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  2. Ron Chernow _ Washington: A Life

    it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.
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  3. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation. He had laid the groundwork for both liberal democracy and capitalism and helped to transform the role of the president from passive administrator to active policy maker, creating the institutional scaffolding for America's future emergence as a great power. He had demonstrated the creative uses of government and helped to weld the states irreversibly into one nation. He had also defended Washington's administration more brilliantly than anyone else, articulating its constitutional underpinnings and enunciating key tenets of foreign policy. "We look in vain for a man who, in an equal space of time, has produced such direct and lasting effects upon our institutions and history," Henry Cabot Lodge was to contend. 62 Hamilton's achievements were never matched because he was present at the government's inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.
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  4. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. "They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced," Jefferson replied: "Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke." Hamilton supposedly replied, "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar.
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  5. Ron Chernow _ Grant

    Four Millions of people heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land, not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so, voters in every part of the land, the right not to be abridged by any state, is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day . . . The adoption of the 15th Amendment . . . constitutes the most important event that has occurred, since the nation came into life." It was a stunning statement of Grant's faith in the new black electorate. He further urged Congress to promote popular education so that "all who possess and exercise political rights, shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the government a blessing.
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  6. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good.
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  7. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully.
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  8. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    Hamilton was not the master builder of the Constitution: the laurels surely go to James Madison. He was, however, its foremost interpreter, starting with The Federalist and continuing with his Treasury tenure, when he had to expound constitutional doctrines to accomplish his goals. He lived, in theory and practice, every syllable of the Constitution. For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton's "works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live." 40
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  9. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    You know the opinion I entertain of mankind and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You s{hould} not have taken advantage of my sensibility to ste{al} into my affections without my consent.
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  10. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
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  11. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    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.
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  12. Ron Chernow _ Alexander Hamilton

    If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.
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