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

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

" By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights. "

" You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of. "

" The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun. "

" The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress. "

" I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class. "

" I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about. "

" For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all. "

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

" If it's a good story, it's a good story, and it draws readers in. "

" Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse. "

" There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling. "

" I read in all forms: paper, computer, phone, audio. "

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

" 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. "

" I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try. "

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

" It's hard to say that Trump actually has a health care policy. "

" 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. "

" A lot of people were ambivalent about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 positioned himself as the peace candidate. Once Johnson sent large amounts of troops into battle in 1965, most Americans were behind the war. "

" It's not an exaggeration to say that Texas gets a lot more out of being part of the United States than the United States gets out of having Texas as one of the states. "

" Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate. "

" When the Constitution was written in 1787, there was this supposition that American politics would be above party. The people who would staff the positions in government would have the interests of the country, or at least their states and congressional districts, at heart, and so they wouldn't form permanent political parties. "

" The Reagan Revolution has had no second act. "

" Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man. "

" If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign. "

" Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office. "

" You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with. "

" The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that. "

" Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more. "