The sight of big ships, of the many new uniforms, at once serious and cool, left Bush with an overall sense of the navy’s power and camaraderie and purpose.

I can see that spark coming back when he talks about the future.

He lived in terror of, well, becoming ordinary.

He made his character his platform.

J.P. Morgan learned to fish in troubled waters.

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

He adored competing but didn’t want you to know he’d ever worked at it.

Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

Diplomacy was a long game.

I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one’s resources. Andrew Carnegie

The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.

The fact that California was the most cosmopolitan state in the union, as a result of the gold rush, simply made white voters more susceptible to racist and xenophobic arguments.

Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.

Andrew Carnegie was an inventor only in the sense that he adopted and adapted the discoveries of others.

Proving himself to himself was no small matter.

Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips.[House judiciary committee chairman Hatton Summers(D) to Vice President John Nance Garner about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to ‘pack the court’.]

He noted that the same summer that witnessed the Constitutional Convention saw the passage of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery north of the Ohio River.

It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing ‘This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it’, than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested.

Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.

Chinese immigrant: “Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.”

A live-in domestic worker: “You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.”

Reporter Jacob Riis made it his mission to expose the horrors of poverty in New York. New to working with a camera, his flash actually set the walls of One apartment inhabited by five blind people on fire.

He was a generous but subtly demanding boss.

Publicity is the engine of politics.

He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.

The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.

The strike spread with the speed of telepathy.

Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.

A young mark twain on the make: “I can’t turn in inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.”

The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal.

Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed

This senate was a place where good Representatives went when they died. Thomas Reed

Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie.

Eugene Debs entered jail a moderate Unionist and emerged a Socialist.

He was a product of a culture where it was generally counterproductive to hold grudges.

He forced himself into good spirits.

He cultivated ideological fuzziness.

Accustomed to motion, he was forced to be still.

He did something he rarely did. He decided not to see things from the other guy’s point of view.

Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do. This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a Republic.

He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind’s eye. It was one of the secrets of his military success.

Indeed, the key to all diplomacy was knowing when they were serious about their threats and when they were posturing. Nations were like individuals, requiring cultivation and the paying of respect.

Time after time during the next six months, he would put me together again.

His charm was not electric, but it was enveloping.

Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.

A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Franco’s Spain.

It was a typical point, made in typical style, mixing pride and humility.

His was a quiet but persistent charisma.

When he came in first, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results.

I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she’d get one-syllable answers.

“John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.

Bushes may not be eloquent explaining emotion, but George HW Bush’s mother knew enough to be in position with her children were ready to talk. She waited up not just to ensure safety but to make the most of the moment of excited emotions. The next morning, they would congeal into polite, one-word answers.

Warner Studios official in the era of silent movies: Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one

He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life.

Even when he played, he made a business of it.

Both sides had more confidence in their opponents’ weaknesses than their own strength.

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.

I’m the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven’t read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will.

I read in all forms: paper, computer, phone, audio.

If you wanted to, you could write history in Haiku.

On style points alone, Donald Trump makes GWB look magnificently presidential.

George W. Bush has shown himself to be a decent guy, not exploiting his former office to make top dollars giving speeches.

President Obama ran a campaign in 2008 that was entirely expected from a non-incumbent. You promise, and you imply that if you elect me, everything good is going to happen.

Americans knock themselves out, especially since 9/11, praising the military.

The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign.

Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history – military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what’s generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

I’m often asked, ‘Why didn’t Benjamin Franklin ever become president?’ My short, easy answer is: He died.

A president can start a war under relatively specious circumstances, and once American soldiers are under fire, Americans will support the soldiers and support the president.

I certainly don’t think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.

A lot of people were ambivalent about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 positioned himself as the peace candidate. Once Johnson sent large amounts of troops into battle in 1965, most Americans were behind the war.

In modern times, the American military has become more bureaucratised.

He means well, but he means well feebly.

Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues.

Fatigue could be the dealmaker’s friend.

It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt.

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

The audience perked up the more. American conservatives were a combative tribe who didn’t speak of liberals as their “friends,” but here Reagan did. His tone was serious, but it wasn’t angry, the way Goldwater’s often was. Reagan criticized Democratic leaders, but he didn’t criticize Democrats. He condemned the direction the American government was going, but he professed confidence in the American people.

Go on and finish your studies,” Gore said. “You are poor enough, but there are greater evils than poverty. Live on no man’s favor. What bread you do eat, let it be the bread of independence. Pursue your profession. Make yourself useful to your friends and a little formidable to your enemies, and you have nothing to fear.

He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign.

Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.

In imperial relationships, getting out proves much more complicated than getting in.

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, “I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.

He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics was more important.