H. W. Brands Quotes

H. W. Brands

Profession : Historian

Birth : August 7, 1953

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

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

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

H. W. Brands

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

H. W. Brands

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H. W. Brands