One of George H. W. Bush's early teachers at Andover wrote, "At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.

It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested."[

He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.

He was a generous but subtly demanding boss.

He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign

The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.

His was a quiet but persistent charisma.

He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life.

I can see that spark coming back when he talks about the future.

He made his character his platform.

Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.

The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.

Time after time during the next six months, he would put me together again.

Reagan to son: how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music.

A live-in domestic worker: "You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.

A young mark twain on the make: "I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp.

Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

Accustomed to motion, he was forced to be still.

His charm was not electric, but it was enveloping.

He was a product of a culture where it was generally counterproductive to hold grudges.

He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind's eye. It was one of the secrets of his military success.

This senate was a place where good Representatives went when they died. Thomas Reed

The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal

I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources. Andrew Carnegie

Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, "This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year.

Proving himself to himself was no small matter.

Both sides had more confidence in their opponents' weaknesses than their own strength.

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. Ralph Waldo Emerson

It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt

The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, "I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.

Bushes may not be eloquent explaining emotion, but George HW Bush's mother knew enough to be in position with her children were ready to talk. She waited up not just to ensure safety but to make the most of the moment of excited emotions. The next morning, they would congeal into polite, one-word answers.

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed

Andrew Carnegie was an inventor only in the sense that he adopted and adapted the discoveries of others.

When he came in first, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results.

Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.

In the immediate aftermath of the great Chicago fire, a business proprietor erected a shack in front of his burned-out business. On a sign, he placed his name and the tagline that everything was gone but wife, children, and energy.

He did something he rarely did. He decided not to see things from the other guy's point of view.

Theodore Roosevelt came to Dekota to experience the dying of one age with the slaying of a rare buffalo and the dawning of the West's industrial age.

Reagan is described as "delivering Barry Goldwater's doctrine with John F. Kennedy's technique.

Chinese immigrant: "Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.

J.P. Morgan learned to fish in troubled waters.

Diplomacy was a long game.

Fatigue could be the dealmaker's friend.

America's mission is to join the most ancient civilizations with the most modern. John Augustus Roeblin

Warner Studios official in the era of silent movies: Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.

John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.

He forced himself into good spirits.

Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.

Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie

He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush's parents on his Andover application

His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.

The sight of big ships, of the many new uniforms, at once serious and cool, left Bush with an overall sense of the navy's power and camaraderie and purpose.

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

He lived in terror of, well, becoming ordinary.

It's philanthropy, but it's good politics, too. Mighty good politics. The poor are some of the most grateful people in the world. George Washington Plunkett.

William "Boss" Tweed was in such thorough control in New York that he made money off of the report the committee printed after investigating him.

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

Even when he played, he made a business of it.

Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues.

I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers.

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.

There was so much – so many tests and tasks, so many tiny referenda.

Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.