I'm dubious about having Social Security put into the stock market. I think that we have gotten very far away from the idea that there's something sacrosanct about retirement investments.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.

Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.

The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.

The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.