H. W. Brands Quotes

Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.

- H. W. Brands

I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.

- H. W. Brands

The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

I'm the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven't read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will.

- H. W. Brands

Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments.

- H. W. Brands

The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

- H. W. Brands

Politics is not something most people have to do every day. Their daily lives are much more influenced by job opportunities, whether the country is in a recession or a boom period. If you really want to understand what drives American history, look at the economic... side.

- H. W. Brands

Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.

- H. W. Brands

The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.

- H. W. Brands

Booker Washington was branded an accommodationist by many of the people who criticized him.

- H. W. Brands

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

In the early days of the republic, the secretary of state was the heir apparent to the president. Presidents could easily hand-pick their party's next candidate. The party caucuses formally selected the candidates, but presidents guided the process.

- H. W. Brands

The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that.

- H. W. Brands

I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.

- H. W. Brands

Reagan's enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan's value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.

- 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?

- H. W. Brands

You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.

- H. W. Brands

Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.

- H. W. Brands

On style points alone, Donald Trump makes GWB look magnificently presidential.

- H. W. Brands

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

- H. W. Brands

The candidate who promises the most has the best chance of winning.

- H. W. Brands

Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.

- H. W. Brands

I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

- H. W. Brands

President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there's one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively.

- H. W. Brands

In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.

- H. W. Brands

Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

I had this grand plan for writing the history of the United States in six volumes. This was in the mid-1990s; I was fairly young and very ambitious. I pitched it to a publisher, who just laughed at me.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him.

- H. W. Brands

I read in all forms: paper, computer, phone, audio.

- H. W. Brands

There is a certain kind of sobering, civilizing effect that being president imposes on people. There is a certain kind of dignity with which you comport yourself. As an observer of the presidency, I have to wonder if Trump would follow that pattern.

- H. W. Brands

Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.

- H. W. Brands

It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected.

- H. W. Brands

Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.

- H. W. Brands

Once you become president, you don't even have to stop for red lights. And if it looks like traffic's too bad, you just take a helicopter.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

If it's a good story, it's a good story, and it draws readers in.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.

- H. W. Brands

People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don't buy studies of presidencies.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it's what they persuade Congress to do.

- H. W. Brands

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

- H. W. Brands

Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

When the Constitution was written in 1787, there was this supposition that American politics would be above party. The people who would staff the positions in government would have the interests of the country, or at least their states and congressional districts, at heart, and so they wouldn't form permanent political parties.

- H. W. Brands

Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more.

- H. W. Brands

Americans knock themselves out, especially since 9/11, praising the military.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

In modern times, the American military has become more bureaucratised.

- 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.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.

- 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.'

- H. W. Brands

By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.

- H. W. Brands

Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.

- H. W. Brands

The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it's been the opposite.

- H. W. Brands

If - heaven forbid - a shooter did come into my class, I wouldn't want to have to worry about getting caught in a crossfire.

- H. W. Brands

When you're actually president, the spin matters a lot less.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

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.

- H. W. Brands

It's hard to say that Trump actually has a health care policy.

- H. W. Brands

When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader.

- H. W. Brands

When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things.

- H. W. Brands

When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully.

- H. W. Brands

I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

In some ways, I would be absolutely fascinated if Trump gets elected.

- H. W. Brands

I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.

- H. W. Brands

The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.

- H. W. Brands

The Tea Party loves Reagan because he said exactly what they want to hear.

- 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.

- H. W. Brands

Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost.

- H. W. Brands

America can change its presidents, but the world doesn't change.

- H. W. Brands

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.

- H. W. Brands

Reagan conspired in the underestimation of his own ability.

- H. W. Brands

Love makes the most careful man wreckless.

- H. W. Brands

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

- H. W. Brands