For just a few dollars registration, you got temporary possession of a good piece of land. Live on it for five years, build a house, and farm it, and it was yours. What a brilliant economic stimulus!

Business schools tend to focus on topics that are suitable to blackboards, so they overemphasize organization and finance. Until very recently, they virtually ignored manufacturing. I think of lot of the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, and now more recently the 2000s can be traced pretty directly to the biases of the business schools.

After I finished the Tycoons - on post-Civil War development - I realized how much I didn't know about the first half of the century, even though there had obviously been an enormous amount of development, so I read about and thought about that for a couple of years before I decided I was ready for a book.

I find her [Frances Trollope] simply delightful, even in her prejudices and cantankerousness. It is a gift to an author to find a funny, wry, perceptive contemporary observer to whom the subject matter seems almost as different and alien, and requiring as much struggling to understand, as it did to me.

The Transcontinental Railroad Act is the first step in creating a continental common market.

We were suddenly getting big, with burgeoning capabilities on all sides, but very clumsy, knew we were on some kind of ride, and things changing fast, but with very little idea of what was going on.

The War of 1812 perhaps the least remembered of American wars because it was fought in such a left-handed slapdash manner on both sides.