After two delightful days, Van Buren told Jefferson that he had to return to Washington for a committee meeting. A disappointed Jefferson told him not to fuss over dreary state affairs. Punctuality, he said, was "a losing business."
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
Van Buren's wooing of Jefferson captured the changing mores in US politics. The Revolutionary Era system of deference was rapidly crumbling. In most states, property qualifications were no longer a prerequisite for voting. A growing number of Americans—all white men, of course—were enfranchised and participating in the political process. The forty-one-year-old Van Buren typified this brash new style of egalitarian politics. He played the game of politics to win elections and build power, and he pursued those goals without apology.
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
Levelheaded and calm, he rarely lost his cool in the company of others. He spurned codes of honor. He ignored insults. He fraternized with his enemies, and even enjoyed their company. At a time when political rivals still settled their differences on the dueling ground, Van Buren's example of courtesy toward the opposition set an important example in establishing some semblance of a peaceful republic.
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
The final factor, of course, is that Cleveland's conception of the role of the federal government—and, for that matter, the presidency—now seems so antiquated as to be unrecognizable to the average American. Indeed, there have been few presidents in American history so preoccupied with the notion that the government should show no special favor to any one group over another.
-Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland
In a democracy it is idle to praise the virtues of a statesman who can't persuade the public. But we should not judge him entirely by that failure, either. The voters turned against him, after all, for standing firm on the same beliefs he held when they elected him—sound money, freer trade, and limited government interference in the economy. In some sense it was a testimony to his integrity: even at a moment of maximum political peril, Grover Cleveland's principles were not open for bidding.
-Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.
"No people can be truly free," he wrote, "unless they are exempt from the debasing influence of ignorance and vice. Upon the knowledge and integrity of the people rests the whole fabric of self-government."
-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival
What made Melvin, the youngest of the Kaminsky kids, so darn funny? Later people said—he himself said—it was Brooklyn, the Depression, being Jewish and growing up in the shadow of Hitler. But there was also something about birth order and the family genes that contributed to "the strange amalgam, the marvelous pastiche that is me."
-Patrick McGilligan, Funny Man: Mel Brooks
It is difficult to improve on the summary of the chronicler who delivered up Adam's first years in a single storm cloud of a sentence: "He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: "he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
As the war drew to a close and Washington stepped down from command, he turned the army over to Knox, who was given the assignment of reducing it to 700 men. He demonstrated a prophetic vision as a statesman. While serving as secretary at war under the confederation government, Knox realized that he needed to redefine perceptions about the army to suit the needs of a democratic republic. Many prominent American leaders wanted to disband the army completely and viewed any force as antithetical to representative government. Knox created a vision of a new kind of army in which solders were instilled with the nation's most cherished values. He believed that soldiers could be trained to fight to preserve political ideals rather than geographic boundary lines, to love liberty more than personal ambition, and to value honor above greed and the spoils of war.
Because of the high wartime inflation—the cost of imports was six times higher than usual—Henry found it difficult to fill the civilian jobs at the arsenals despite offering exorbitant wages of $30 a month along with a suit of clothes and another suit every year along with the normal army rations. He wrote Washington that he would add an allotment of half a pint of rum per day to sweeten the deal.
-Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution
Lucy was especially homesick for her family and the gaiety of her life of just a few years earlier. She felt out of place in Connecticut, where the people, she thought, lacked gentility and displayed coarse manners and unrefined behavior. Henry advised her: "Take care, my love of permitting your disgust to the Connecticut people to escape your lips. Indiscreet expressions are handed from town to town and a long while remembered by people not blessed with expanded minds. The want of that refinement which you seem to speak of is, or will be, the salvation of America; for refinement of manners introduces corruption and venality. . . . There is a kind of simplicity in young states as in young children which is quite pleasing to an attentive observer."
-Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution
Power worried him: no one ever believed he possessed too much of the stuff. His sympathies were with the man in the street, to whom he believed government answered. A friend distilled his politics to two maxims: "Rulers should have little, the people much." And privilege should make way for genius and industry. Railing against "the odious hereditary distinction of families."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Deeply idealistic—a moral people, Adams held, would elect moral leaders—he believed virtue the soul of democracy. To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Nine-year-old Henry Knox entered the Boston bookstore, leaving his childhood behind. The boy, blond and tall for his age, could see shelves of books and boxes of fine stationery adorned with floral designs imported from London, along with writing materials, inkwells, quills, pamphlets, and writing paper neatly laid out for customers. His days of playing with friends or attending school would be replaced with the bookshop's chores and adult concerns over money and the support of his family.
HIs life had been turned upside down that year, 1759. His father, William Knox, a once-prosperous shipbuilder, left the family after his business collapsed in the midst of economic hard times sweeping the American colonies. Plagued by debts, the disillusioned Knox boarded a ship bound for St. Eustatius in the West Indies, leaving his family with no means of financial support. Henry was left to care for his mother and his three-year-old brother. His older siblings, John and Benjamin, had left home years earlier to earn a living as merchant seamen, never to return to Boston.
Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution
I will not attempt to sound the depths of psychoanalysis to explain human behavior, which is inexplicable as life itself. More than sex or infantile aberrations, I believe that most of our ideational compulsions stem from atavistic causes—however, I did not have to read books to know that the theme of life is conflict and pain. Instinctively, all my clowning was based on this. My means of contriving comedy plot was simple. It was the process of getting people in and out of trouble.
-Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography
He had these enthusiasms for his projects and his future—his present. It was not as if you had to deny yourself in the present for the future. The focus was on how interesting things are today, how much fun to see them built. It was so much fun being in the moment. That's what he always communicated.
-Janet Lowe, Damn Right! Behind the Scenes With Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
Munger and Buffett had something else in common. "Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich," said Charlie, who early on earned his living as a lawyer. "Not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people. I don't know where I get that notion from, but I had it.
-Janet Lowe, Damn Right! Behind the Scenes With Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
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