Top 100 Ron Chernow Quotes
#2. 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.
Ron Chernow
#3. 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.
Ron Chernow
#4. Even amid a state of open warfare, these law-abiding men felt obligated to issue a formal document, giving a dispassionate list of their reasons for secession.
Ron Chernow
#5. The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
Ron Chernow
#6. Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
Ron Chernow
#7. A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
Ron Chernow
#8. I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.
Ron Chernow
#9. 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.
Ron Chernow
#10. Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president. The
Ron Chernow
#11. The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
Ron Chernow
#12. In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.
Ron Chernow
#13. 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.
Ron Chernow
#14. (regarding Charles Lee) This eccentric and notably slovenly man was always trailed by his beloved dogs. "When I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs", he once explained, "I shall transfer my benevolence to them.
Ron Chernow
#15. The task of government was not to stop selfish striving - a hopeless task - but to harness it for the public good.
Ron Chernow
#16. He thought America's character would be defined by how it treated its vanquished enemies, and he wanted to graduate from bitter wartime grievances to the forgiving posture of peace.
Ron Chernow
#17. You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.
Ron Chernow
#18. 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.
Ron Chernow
#19. Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed" and "A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
Ron Chernow
#20. 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.
Ron Chernow
#21. 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.
Ron Chernow
#22. Light reading (by this, I mean books of little importance) may amuse for the moment, but leaves nothing solid behind.
Ron Chernow
#23. In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
Ron Chernow
#24. Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
Ron Chernow
#25. 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.
Ron Chernow
#26. In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if "the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble" maintained such open defiance of authority. 13
Ron Chernow
#27. The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
Ron Chernow
#28. Washington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as my boy.
Ron Chernow
#29. explaining that he did so "from a desire of testifying
Ron Chernow
#30. He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that "no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false." If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end "that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent."34
Ron Chernow
#31. I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.
Ron Chernow
#32. There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
Ron Chernow
#33. Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.
Ron Chernow
#34. Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.
Ron Chernow
#35. greed can corrupt a state and that a public official who betrays his trust "ought to feel the utmost rigor of public resentment and be detested as a traitor of the worst and most dangerous kind.
Ron Chernow
#36. A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.
Ron Chernow
#37. In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow
#38. Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
Ron Chernow
#39. After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.
Ron Chernow
#40. 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.
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#41. Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)
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#42. While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty. On
Ron Chernow
#43. A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.
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#44. Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.
Ron Chernow
#46. 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.
Ron Chernow
#47. The painting also pinpointed an important quirk of Washington's face: the lazy right eye that slid off into the corner while the left eye stared straight ahead. To prepare for the equestrian
Ron Chernow
#48. As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
Ron Chernow
#49. As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you're a financial genius.
Ron Chernow
#50. 1755, Knox decided to propagate the gospel and was sent
Ron Chernow
#51. Rockefeller was sensitive about adults who behaved in a high-handed fashion toward him. Having assumed so much responsibility at home, he now thought of himself as a mature person.
Ron Chernow
#52. I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
Ron Chernow
#53. I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
Ron Chernow
#54. Washington replied, "I always knew Colonel Hamilton to be a man of superior talents, but never supposed that he had any knowledge of finance." "He knows everything, sir," Morris replied. "To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.
Ron Chernow
#55. After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.
Ron Chernow
#56. 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.
Ron Chernow
#57. After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
Ron Chernow
#58. When the market is just going up, up, and up, we all tend to be blind to the holes in the market. They're all papered over by the rise.
Ron Chernow
#59. I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
Ron Chernow
#60. It was, Eliza Hamilton Holly noted pointedly, the imperative duty that Eliza had bequeathed to all her children: Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.
Ron Chernow
#61. 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.
Ron Chernow
#62. The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.
Ron Chernow
#63. Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.
Ron Chernow
#64. One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.
Ron Chernow
#65. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
Ron Chernow
#66. if Clinton was taken prisoner "it would be our misfortune, since the British government could not find another commander so incompetent to send in his place.
Ron Chernow
#67. As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts.
Ron Chernow
#68. Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel.
Ron Chernow
#69. The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.
Ron Chernow
#70. Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.
Ron Chernow
#71. 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.
Ron Chernow
#72. polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity,
Ron Chernow
#73. If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.
Ron Chernow
#74. Daring in design, cautious in execution - it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.
Ron Chernow
#75. Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully.
Ron Chernow
#76. Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.
Ron Chernow
#77. 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 relatives.
Ron Chernow
#78. Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.
Ron Chernow
#79. By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
Ron Chernow
#80. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.
Ron Chernow
#81. I think that we Americans, at least in the Southern col[onie]s, cannot contend with a good grace for liberty until we shall have enfranchised our slaves, Laurens told a friend right before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.64
Ron Chernow
#82. The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
Ron Chernow
#83. Finally, he flung his hat on the ground in disgust and fumed, "Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?
Ron Chernow
#84. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably
Ron Chernow
#85. The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained,
Ron Chernow
#86. This, I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction,
Ron Chernow
#87. Another female observer found Madison entertaining in private but "mute, cold, and repulsive" in company.
Ron Chernow
#88. As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.
Ron Chernow
#89. When news of the crash came, probably a lot of people in small towns and farms across America felt a sense of grim satisfaction that the sinners had finally been punished for their wicked ways.
Ron Chernow
#90. The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
Ron Chernow
#91. Since critics found it hard to defeat him on intellectual grounds, they stooped to personal attacks.
Ron Chernow
#92. Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
Ron Chernow
#93. There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.
Ron Chernow
#94. Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.
Ron Chernow
#95. In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.
Ron Chernow
#96. His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in portraits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and gilt-edged lapels, his neck swathed delicately in a ruffled lace jabot.
Ron Chernow
#97. Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, 'Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won't damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won't put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.
Ron Chernow
#98. Hamilton saw America's essential nature being forged in the throes of battle, and that made honest action imperative.
Ron Chernow
#99. The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance.
Ron Chernow
#100. We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.
Ron Chernow
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