One of George H. W. Bush’s early teachers at Andover wrote, “At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.
He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.
He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign
The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.
He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life.
I can see that spark coming back when he talks about the future.
Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.
The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.
Time after time during the next six months, he would put me together again.
A live-in domestic worker: “You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.
A young mark twain on the make: “I can’t turn in inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.
Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.
He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.
His charm was not electric, but it was enveloping.
He was a product of a culture where it was generally counterproductive to hold grudges.
He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind’s eye. It was one of the secrets of his military success.
This senate was a place where good Representatives went when they died. Thomas Reed
The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal
I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one’s resources. Andrew Carnegie
Both sides had more confidence in their opponents’ weaknesses than their own strength.
Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.
Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. Ralph Waldo Emerson
It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt
The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.
Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, “I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.
One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed
Andrew Carnegie was an inventor only in the sense that he adopted and adapted the discoveries of others.
When he came in first, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results.
Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.
In the immediate aftermath of the great Chicago fire, a business proprietor erected a shack in front of his burned-out business. On a sign, he placed his name and the tagline that everything was gone but wife, children, and energy.
He did something he rarely did. He decided not to see things from the other guy’s point of view.
Theodore Roosevelt came to Dekota to experience the dying of one age with the slaying of a rare buffalo and the dawning of the West’s industrial age.
Reagan is described as “delivering Barry Goldwater’s doctrine with John F. Kennedy’s technique.
Chinese immigrant: “Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.
America’s mission is to join the most ancient civilizations with the most modern. John Augustus Roeblin
Warner Studios official in the era of silent movies: Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.
John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.
Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie
Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.
He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush’s parents on his Andover application
His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.
The sight of big ships, of the many new uniforms, at once serious and cool, left Bush with an overall sense of the navy’s power and camaraderie and purpose.
When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.
It’s philanthropy, but it’s good politics, too. Mighty good politics. The poor are some of the most grateful people in the world. George Washington Plunkett.
William “Boss” Tweed was in such thorough control in New York that he made money off of the report the committee printed after investigating him.
Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.
Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.
The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.
Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues.
I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she’d get one-syllable answers.
The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.
There was so much – so many tests and tasks, so many tiny referenda.
Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.