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" 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. "

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

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

" Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go. "

" There is a certain kind of sobering, civilizing effect that being president imposes on people. There is a certain kind of dignity with which you comport yourself. As an observer of the presidency, I have to wonder if Trump would follow that pattern. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Reagan's enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan's value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost. "

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

" 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. "

" The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.' "

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

" 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. "

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