H. W. Brands Quotes

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there’s one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively.

In the business arena, the standard rules of morality don’t apply. What we’re really looking for is efficiency. It doesn’t do anyone any good to be nice to the weak. In a certain sense, competition is inefficient.

In the early 19th to the early 20th century, people had a lot of things wrong with them. Doctors didn’t know how to fix them, and so they lived with them.

In modern times, the American military has become more bureaucratised.

I had this grand plan for writing the history of the United States in six volumes. This was in the mid-1990s; I was fairly young and very ambitious. I pitched it to a publisher, who just laughed at me.

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

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

The shelf life of a seventh-year State of the Union address is about five minutes. Presidents can propose stuff. They’re probably not likely to get it done.

People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don’t buy studies of presidencies.

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

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.

Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost.

I’m often asked, ‘Why didn’t Benjamin Franklin ever become president?’ My short, easy answer is: He died.

I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days.

I’m more inclined to say the presidency has changed Trump rather than Trump changed the presidency. He has moderated or reversed himself on most of the positions he took as a candidate. Reality has set in, as it does with every new president.

Theodore Roosevelt, when he was out of office, he would do things to draw attention. But when you are president, you don’t need to shout. When you are in office, you are the story.

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

I’ve been writing American history for a long time, and I’ve had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they’re hard to write about because they don’t leave much of a historical trace, and they’re not usually involved in high-profile public events.

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

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I’ve done before.

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.

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

If – heaven forbid – a shooter did come into my class, I wouldn’t want to have to worry about getting caught in a crossfire.

America can change its presidents, but the world doesn’t change.

The candidate who promises the most has the best chance of winning.

The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it’s been the opposite.

I’ve probably written some books – I know I’ve written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

Once you become president, you don’t even have to stop for red lights. And if it looks like traffic‘s too bad, you just take a helicopter.

The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?

If you put on the military uniform, you’re a prima facie hero. Generals are the epitome of that. They’re the ones who have been most successful at the soldier‘s trade.

President Obama ran a campaign in 2008 that was entirely expected from a non-incumbent. You promise, and you imply that if you elect me, everything good is going to happen.

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.

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.

Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.

I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.

Politics is not something most people have to do every day. Their daily lives are much more influenced by job opportunities, whether the country is in a recession or a boom period. If you really want to understand what drives American history, look at the economic… side.

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.

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.

In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.

Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.