Ron Chernow

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

— Ron Chernow

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

— Ron Chernow

“Many mickles make a muckle.”

— Ron Chernow

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

— Ron Chernow

I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.

— Ron Chernow

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.

— Ron Chernow

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.

— Ron Chernow

There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.

— Ron Chernow

“Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war.”

— Ron Chernow

“Thinking the move suicidal, Grant believed the South would stop short of the “awful leap” of secession.”

— Ron Chernow

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

— Ron Chernow

Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.

— Ron Chernow

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

— Ron Chernow

“In the felicitous words of one early Burr biographer, “The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.”

— Ron Chernow

“For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed…

— Ron Chernow

“At this, Hamilton dropped any pose of civility and chastised Monroe, saying “your representation is totally false.”

— Ron Chernow

“He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth…

— Ron Chernow

“It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye…

— Ron Chernow

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry…

— Ron Chernow

“Summing up Grant’s career, Frederick Douglass wrote: “In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a…

— Ron Chernow

We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly,…

— Ron Chernow

“January 25, 1785, nineteen people gathered at the home of innkeeper John Simmons to form a society that would safeguard blacks who…

— Ron Chernow

“He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. “Take…

— Ron Chernow

“Hamilton then picked up a slim volume on the table and turned it over in his hands. “Ah, this is the constitution,”…

— Ron Chernow

“The speech lacked soaring cadences or memorable lines, yet it touched on two explosive issues at the finale. He advised Native Americans…

— Ron Chernow

“In his essays on the need for executive-branch vigor, Hamilton continually invoked the king of England as an example of what should…

— Ron Chernow

“a full-blooded Seneca Iroquois sachem, Ely S. Parker, who grew up on an Indian reservation in upstate New York and was a…

— Ron Chernow

“Many observers were disturbed by all the uniformed men striding the White House corridors. In a broad-brush indictment, Charles Sumner disapproved of…

— Ron Chernow

“On September 9 the tour touched its nadir in St. Louis when Johnson, in another intemperate outburst, had the gall to blame…

— Ron Chernow

“Since Ulysses S. Grant’s spelling could border on the eccentric, I have taken the liberty of correcting that and his punctuation and…

— Ron Chernow

“Whatever his disappointments, Hamilton, forty, must have left Philadelphia with an immense feeling of accomplishment. The Whiskey Rebellion had been suppressed, the…

— Ron Chernow

“Around this time, a young man named Samuel Slater slipped through the tight protective net thrown by British authorities around their textile…

— Ron Chernow

“Grant deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln for what he did for the freed slaves. He got…

— Ron Chernow

“bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral…

— Ron Chernow

“This encouraged Grant to revive a proposal he had floated a year earlier to connect American canals and rivers into a national…

— Ron Chernow

“When a congressional committee reported in February on the Mississippi bloodshed, it concluded that the nation had arrived at a crossroads and…

— Ron Chernow

“Having been battered by the world in his earlier years, he had come to rely on family and friends and never forgot…

— Ron Chernow

“Grant’s catatonic state didn’t last. Soon he was devoting four or five hours daily to his memoirs,”

— Ron Chernow

“Only a free press could check abuses of executive power, Hamilton asserted.”

— Ron Chernow

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

— Ron Chernow