Sublime

“I mean this guy’s a general. He’s like Patton,” Ackman said. “And running a railroad is like running an army, right?” Harrison had made the same reference about Bill Thompson, his mentor.

Andrew Jackson claimed the right to govern not because he was the smartest man in the room. He based it on his bravery and cunning. Being the smartest man in the room leaves anyone vulnerable. Things are expected of him that he cannot deliver, because intelligence by itself is insufficient to govern.

“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”

As did military command for Lincoln, who knew without having to read Clausewitz that wars, however ferocious, must serve, not consume, the states waging them. War could never be an end in itself, but it could be the means by which an endangered state saved itself. And Lincoln saw that a civil war—which he’d allowed to be forced upon him—might also

I never had much respect for Tom Scott’s ability to accomplish any great undertaking. He can give everybody a Pass, and get them to say he is a “big Injun” and good fellow—but he is not the man to lay down a Hundred or Two Hundred Thousand Dollars Cash, to carry a scheme of his own. . . . [Gould is] the reverse of Scott; he is a one man power; cons

Walter is assured a place in history because he is the Lord Rothschild to whom Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, addressed the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, saying His Majesty’s Government viewed with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. It was written in the form of a letter beginning “Dear