342 Quotes by Ron Chernow

Grant’s postwar fame didn’t spare him the bane of his father-in-law’s glaring presence. After he and Julia settled into their Georgetown home, Colonel Dent had no qualms about moving in with them, forcing the victorious Union general to tolerate under his roof a cranky, unrepentant rebel who pontificated about the North violating southern rights.

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if “having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?

More than anyone else, the omnipresent Hamilton galvanized, inspired, and scandalized the newborn nation, serving as a flash point for pent-up conflicts of class, geography, race, religion, and ideology. His contemporaries often seemed defined by how they reacted to the political gauntlets that he threw down repeatedly with such defiant panache.

The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.”21.

It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and father of mischief. It has been the ruin of many worthy families, the loss of many a man’s honor, and the cause of suicide. To all those who enter the list, it is equally fascinating. The successful gamester pushes his good fortune till it is overtaken by a reverse. The losing gamester, in hopes of retrieving past misfortunes, goes on from bad to worse.”37 Washington.

Washington presented a rare case of a revolutionary leader who, instead of being blinded by political fervor, recognized that fallible human beings couldn’t always live up to the high standards he set for them.

Abigail Adams, who did not set sail until November, seemed miffed by the enforced southward shift, swearing that she would try to enjoy Philadelphia but that “when all is done it will not be Broadway.

In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.