In waiting for the glorious moment of that first book contract, writers must have giant reservoirs of patience. Yet they must persevere because they don't know the destiny that is being worked out for them. They creep humbly along the ground, without the spacious aerial vision of their lives that would show them the destiny in store for them.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.

That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

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.

Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.