QUOTES by H. W. Brands
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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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The shelf life of a seventh-year State of the Union address is about five minutes. Presidents can propose stuff. They're probably not likely to get it done.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
President Obama ran a campaign in 2008 that was entirely expected from a non-incumbent. You promise, and you imply that if you elect me, everything good is going to happen.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
George W. Bush has shown himself to be a decent guy, not exploiting his former office to make top dollars giving speeches.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
On style points alone, Donald Trump makes GWB look magnificently presidential.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In the business arena, the standard rules of morality don't apply. What we're really looking for is efficiency. It doesn't do anyone any good to be nice to the weak. In a certain sense, competition is inefficient.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Abraham Lincoln spoke out against the Mexican War. But once Americans were under fire, people who were on the fence felt obliged to support it.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
A president can start a war under relatively specious circumstances, and once American soldiers are under fire, Americans will support the soldiers and support the president.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The Catalonian movement is quite serious; I don't think it's simply symbolic. I think that they believe that Catalonia can be more successful on its own than as part of Spain.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In revering the Founders, we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements - necessary improvements - in the republican experiment they began.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.'
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?
Quote by -H. W. Brands
With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
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.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.
Quote by -H. W. Brands