Michael Gross > Quotes

“Fifteen—it’s spelled out in the building’s custom-designed logo—was something completely different from the buildings before it. Like its logo, the neoclassical über-condo was a throwback to the golden age of Manhattan apartment houses, which are called prewars though they were mostly built between 1912 and 1930, as well as a gauntlet before the remains of what, for half a century, had passed as American Society.”
― Michael Gross, House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

“All that notwithstanding, “the original colonies did not exude universal piety,” according to a statistical study conducted in 1988. “In colonial America, no more than ten to twenty percent of the population actually belonged to a church congregation.”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

“Why was he so morally thin?”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

“In 2013, Sanford I. “Sandy” Weill, the financier who created Citigroup, sold his 15CPW penthouse—the second largest after Loeb’s—for $88 million, twice what it cost him six years earlier and the highest price ever paid for a Manhattan apartment.”
― Michael Gross, House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

“I can understand the feeling of a man struggling to escape the practical slavery imposed by the multitude of obligations which crowd upon a man who tries to be a good citizen. Root writes to Jack Morgan in 1927 about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Michael Gross' Rogues Gallery”
― Michael Gross

“chaos in his mind, from which nothing orderly can flow.”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

“Ultimately, the deportation of fewer than four thousand Native Americans cost about $35 million, and Cass’s belief that force would convince the Seminole to stop their fight and leave proved wildly optimistic.111”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

“Far from being anomalous, Sanford was an early and wildly flawed example of a new breed of WASP who consistently equated self-interest with the national interest,”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

“advocating that France go to war—almost any war, but best of all a war against Britain—believing it would be a safety valve for the popular fury against the nobility.”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class

“To fit people for a republic … a previous education is necessary,” he wrote.”
― Michael Gross, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class