Ron Chernow

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

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

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.

It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.

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.'

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

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.

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.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

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 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.

With any piece of writing, you're hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does.

I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.

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.

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.

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.

When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.

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.

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.

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

Politics boils down to the stories we tell ourselves. And unfortunately, we tell ourselves different stories.

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

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.

Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.

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.

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.

The thing with all the Founding Fathers, one of the most common words they used was 'posterity.' They were constantly referring to posterity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.

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.

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.

The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.

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

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.

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.