342 Quotes by Ron Chernow

Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors.

Nothing alarmed the white South more than black power at the polls, which was why most terror was directed there.

He had a great general’s ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. “You can abuse me, you can strike me,” Rockefeller said, “so long as you let me have my own way.

One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, “We forgot.

Clinton epitomized the flaws of the old confederation, and he denounced “the pernicious intrigues of a man high in office to preserve power and emolument to himself at the expense of the union, the peace, and the happiness of America.

The task of government was not to stop selfish striving – a hopeless task – but to harness it for the public good.

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

As his life steadily unraveled, he pawned his gold watch and chain for $20 on December 23, 1857, to purchase Christmas presents for his children – perhaps the symbolic nadir of his life.

Could the fractious tendencies engendered by years of fighting be channeled in constructive directions? The Revolution had unified sharply disparate groups. Without the bonds of wartime comradeship, would the divisive pulls of class, region, and ideology tear the new country apart?