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" In the early days of the republic, the secretary of state was the heir apparent to the president. Presidents could easily hand-pick their party's next candidate. The party caucuses formally selected the candidates, but presidents guided the process. "

H. W. Brands

Republic

Early

Days

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

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

" With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

H. W. Brands

Abandon

Our Love

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

" 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. "

" When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

H. W. Brands

Republican

Power

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan. "

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

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

" I'm the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven't read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "