H.W. Brands > Quotes

“Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, "This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“Reagan to son: how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music.”
― H.W. Brands, Reagan: The Life

“Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.”
― H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

“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.”
― H.W. Brands, Reagan: The Life

“From all over the planet they came…. They came in companies and alone, with money and without, knowing and naïve. They tore themselves from warm hearths and good homes, promising to return; they fled from cold hearts and bad debts, never to return. They were farmers and merchants and sailors and slaves and abolitionists and soldiers of fortune and ladies of the night. They jumped bail to start their journey, and jumped ship at journey’s end. They were the pillars of their communities, and their communities’ dregs….”
― H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

“or creed.” These rights included: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education. Roosevelt”
― H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign”
― H.W. Brands

“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.”
― H.W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants

“As the golden news spread beyond California to the outside world, it triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. From all over the planet they came—from Mexico and Peru and Chile and Argentina, from Oregon and Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand and China, from the American North and the American South, from Britain and France and Germany and Italy and Greece and Russia.”
― H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

“He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics was more important.”
― H.W. Brands

“As when some carcass, hidden in sequestered nook, draws from every near and distant point myriads of discordant vultures, so drew these little flakes of gold the voracious sons of men. …This little scratch upon the earth to make a backwoods mill-race touched the cerebral nerve that quickened humanity, and sent a thrill throughout the system. It tingled in the ear and at the finger-ends; it buzzed about the brain and tickled in the stomach; it warmed the blood and swelled the heart; new fires were kindled on hearth-stones, new castles builded in the air. If Satan from Diablo’s peak had sounded the knell of time; if a heavenly angel from the Sierra’s height had heralded the millennial day; if the blessed Christ himself had risen from that ditch and proclaimed to all mankind amnesty — their greedy hearts had never half so thrilled. (Hubert Howe Bancroft)”
― H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

“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,”
― H.W. Brands, Reagan: The Life

“The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill—mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries—passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s).”
― H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

“Gen. Scott saw more through the eyes of his staff officers than through his own.”
― H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

“American Indians, for example, had resisted every effort by the English to teach them the arts of civilization. Franklin thought this striking, yet hardly inexplicable. “They visit us frequently,” he told Collinson, “and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact society procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding, and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts.” The reason was plain enough: “In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plenty.” Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In one case an Englishman raised with the Indians inherited a substantial estate; he came home to test his new circumstances but soon abandoned them, leaving the estate to a younger brother and carrying off only a gun and a coat. Franklin related yet another story that further illustrated his point. Some years earlier one of the colonies had concluded a treaty with the Six Nations (the Iroquois confederacy of the lower Great Lakes region). All that remained was the exchange of civilities. The English commissioners offered to underwrite the education of half a dozen of the brightest Indian lads at the College of William and Mary, the finest educational institution in the region. The Indians responded that they were most grateful for this kind offer but must decline. Some Indian youths had been educated in this way several years before and had returned good for nothing, being unable to hunt, trap, or fight. The Indians made a counteroffer: to take a dozen English children to the Indians’ great council, where they would be raised as real and useful men.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“When an acquaintance commiserated upon hearing of the loss of America’s capital, Franklin replied, “You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“When I speak, I speak to the point, and when I act in earnest, I act to the point. If a man minds his own business, I let him alone, but if he crosses my path, he must get out of the way.”
― H.W. Brands, American Colossus

“Bradley admitted. “The swiftness and magnitude of the victory were mind-boggling. We had been on the point of despair, bracing for a ‘Dunkirk’ at Pusan and/or a disaster at Inchon. A mere two weeks later the North Korean Army had been routed and all South Korea had been regained. MacArthur was deservedly canonized as a ‘military genius.’ Inchon was his boldest and most dazzling victory. In hindsight, the JCS seemed like a bunch of Nervous Nellies to have doubted.”
― H.W. Brands, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War

“The reason is that the people know that the Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.”
― H.W. Brands, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War

“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.”
― H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

“Truman’s bold stroke in firing MacArthur ended his own career as surely as it terminated MacArthur’s, but it sustained hope that humanity might survive the nuclear age. The courage of Truman’s decision had never been in question; six decades later, its wisdom was apparent as well.”
― H.W. Brands, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War

“When she died, he didn’t simply put away his feelings for her; he walled off a wing of the emotional house in which he lived. He would marry again and become devoted to his second wife. He would overflow with paternal feelings for his children. But he would never again visit that part of his personality where he had courted Alice.”
― H.W. Brands, T.R.: A Life

“I looked on for a moment; a frenzy seized my soul; unbidden my legs performed some entirely new movements of polka steps—I took several. Houses were too small for me to stay in; I was soon in the street in search of necessary outfits. Piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble, dazzling the eye with their rich appliances; thousands of slaves bowing to my beck and call; myriads of fair virgins contending with each other for my love—were among the fancies of my fevered imagination. The Rothschilds, Girards, and Astors appeared to me but poor people. In short, I had a very violent attack of the gold fever.”
― H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

“In any event, it caused him to join the army, that historic institution of elevation for the ambitious but badly born.”
― H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

“Once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.” More applause. “In war there is no substitute for victory.” Still more applause.”
― H.W. Brands, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War

“Yet Ralph was not without collateral of sorts. His absence in Berkshire left his paramour, the madam milliner, in distress both emotional and financial. Her relationship with Ralph had cost her friends and a job. She knew Franklin as an easy mark for a hard tale; with tears, sighs, and doubtless the well-timed coquettish glance, she took up where Ralph had left off fishing in Franklin’s purse. Yet Franklin was not a complete naïf, at least not on this point. He favored her requests for money, then made a request of his own. As he phrased it later: “Presuming on my importance to her, I attempted familiarities.” The vigor of his attempt exceeded its welcome. The initiative was “repulsed with a proper resentment,” forcing Franklin to withdraw. The miscue cost him more than embarrassment. The woman informed Ralph of the real Mr. Franklin’s improper advance, prompting Ralph to declare his friendship with Franklin ended and his financial obligations canceled. Franklin felt himself in no position to make an issue of his loss. As he was learning to do, he philosophized that this was all for the best. He never would have seen the money anyway; nothing had been sacrificed save his good reputation in the eyes of a woman whose own reputation was hardly the finest, and of a friend who was no true friend. “In the loss of his friendship,” Franklin concluded of Ralph, “I found myself relieved from a burden.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“Franklin appreciated the possibility of self-delusion in such matters. He regularly examined his motives. For the present at least, regarding the struggle with the proprietors, he was satisfied. “I am persuaded that I do not oppose their views from pique, disappointment, or personal resentment, but, as I think, from a regard to the public good. I may be mistaken in what is that public good; but at least I mean well.” The proprietors quite clearly did not. “I am sometimes ashamed for them, when I see them differing with their people for trifles, and instead of being adored, as they might be, like demi-gods, become the object of universal hatred and contempt.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“Truman’s combination of firmness and patience had held freedom’s ground without provoking war. It was hard to imagine any chief executive doing better.”
― H.W. Brands, The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War

“He also received a parting gift from Cotton Mather. To Franklin’s surprise the minister evinced a desire to see the young man. Franklin visited his library, where Mather indicated that all was forgiven. But not quite forgotten: on showing Franklin out via a side passage, he suddenly said, “Stoop, stoop!” Franklin did not understand him and ran into a low beam. Never one to let a sermonizing moment pass, Mather explained, “You are young and have the world before you. Stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin