H. W. Brands Quotes

"Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for."

"For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all."

"The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun."

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

"The Reagan Revolution has had no second act."

"When people think of the oil industry, they think of Rockefeller, much like when people think of the software industry, they think of Bill Gates."

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

"I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try."

"I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories."

"I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain."

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

"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."

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

"You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with."

"He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him."

"Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse."

"It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected."

"Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career."

"Reagan conspired in the underestimation of his own ability."

"Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost."

"Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments."

"In revering the Founders, we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements - necessary improvements - in the republican experiment they began."

"Love makes the most careful man wreckless."

"People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age."

"The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress."

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

"The Catalonian movement is quite serious; I don't think it's simply symbolic. I think that they believe that Catalonia can be more successful on its own than as part of Spain."

"It's not an exaggeration to say that Texas gets a lot more out of being part of the United States than the United States gets out of having Texas as one of the states."

"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."