Quotes from Amity Shlaes

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

Everybody should pay some tax, just as everybody should vote.

Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.

The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.

When you do something moral and upright and wander off by yourself, well, everyone doesn't always follow you, do they, right? You pat yourself on your sanctimonious back but it doesn't mean the crowd rewards you for doing what you think is right.

I'm always for lower taxes because lower taxes make people want to do things. Less burden, more fun, and economics is about people wanting to have fun. Growth is fun for people in the marketplace.

If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

Coolidge's stat was so low; he's ranked in the bottom half of presidents. What I found when I encountered this man was the leader I might like to see today.

Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.

The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.

McCain likes strong defense, and he's viscerally suspicious of big companies. So he's more a Square Deal guy than a New Deal guy.

In the end, all new schools, public or private, snobby or not, add value to the education market, making it bigger and more efficient, in the same way that Zuckerberg added wealth to the economy even for non-Facebook fans.

Anti-parent music seems to be all the pop-rock market wants.

Who is the forgotten man...? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.

I regard a good budget as among the noblest monuments of virtue.

Isn't it a strange thing," he asked Barton, "that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?

Coolidge had ladled out his share of mockery, especially in college, but could see now that attack politics yielded poor results. The best way to win was to stick to the issues and forgo any personal attacks or name-calling. Civility would be his rule from now on. He would try it out in his next campaign, for the office of state representative in Boston.

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.

One should never trouble about getting a better job. But one should do one's present job in such a manner as to qualify for a better job when it comes along." The

We have no money to bestow upon a class of people that is not taken from the whole people," he continued; the individual was going to lose out to the group.

The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.

Coolidge believed higher taxes were wrong because they took away from men money that was their property; he believed lower rates were good precisely because they encouraged enterprise, but also because they brought less money. Low rates starved the government beast.

Surveying the travails of the thirtieth president, some writers have suggested that those personal defeats are the essence of the Coolidge story. They err. Coolidge's is not a story of "Yes, but." It is a story of "But yes." For at every stage, Coolidge did push forward, and so triumph.

Most presidents place faith in action; the modern presidency is perpetual motion. Coolidge made virtue of inaction.