Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.
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.
We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital.
You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.
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.
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.
There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.
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.
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.
Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.
Hamilton had a certain social versatility, and in a way, that is understandable because he's someone who rises up from the lowest rungs of society and then scales the top. And he gets to know people from every strata along the way.
Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.
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.
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 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.
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.
The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.
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.
In waiting for the glorious moment of that first book contract, writers must have giant reservoirs of patience. Yet they must persevere because they don't know the destiny that is being worked out for them. They creep humbly along the ground, without the spacious aerial vision of their lives that would show them the destiny in store for them.
A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.)