Top 40 Ron Chernow Quotes

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.

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.

I just have been so surprised and delighted with what has happened with ‘Hamilton.’ It really has been one of the most enchanting experiences of my life.

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.

A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.

I’m a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

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.

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant‘s presidency rests upon posterity‘s view of Reconstruction.

I’m sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.

Unless we know where we’ve been as a country, we don’t know where we are or where we are going.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.

The story of Alexander Hamilton lends itself to hip-hop treatment. Hamilton’s personality is driven and unrelenting, and the music has that same quality. The music and the man mirror each other.

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.

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.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

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.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.

The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don’t necessarily offer safety and diversification.

In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.

I’m dubious about having Social Security put into the stock market. I think that we have gotten very far away from the idea that there’s something sacrosanct about retirement investments.

Hamilton was extremely combative. Not only was he combative, but he also overreacted to anything he perceived as a threat or a criticism.

I think there’s a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

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.

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

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.

I think one of the important things that’s happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.

I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.

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.

There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.

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.

I find that when I come upon something that I think is a historical revelation, I have the sort of adrenaline rush that I imagine a gambler gets in Las Vegas when he hits the jackpot. It’s still tremendously exciting to me, and I think all of my peers in the business feel the same way.

Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don’t really understand its full significance.

The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.

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.

I’m disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: Liberty, justice, freedom, and tolerance.

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.

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.