Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
I felt blessed by the existence of Horace Porter's 'Campaigning With Grant.'
I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson's masterly saga, 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'
With any piece of writing, you're hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does.
Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.
Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
I'm disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: Liberty, justice, freedom, and tolerance.
When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
Politics boils down to the stories we tell ourselves. And unfortunately, we tell ourselves different stories.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
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.
I think one of the important things that's happened in the course of the century is that life expectancy has doubled.
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.
I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.
I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.
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.
Hamilton was extremely combative. Not only was he combative, but he also overreacted to anything he perceived as a threat or a criticism.
The thing with all the Founding Fathers, one of the most common words they used was 'posterity.' They were constantly referring to posterity.
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 best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.
Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.
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.
In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.
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.
That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.
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.
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.
As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that's the last thing I would have expected.
One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.
I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.