Quotes from Amity Shlaes

Once, on a walk with the president, Senator Selden Spencer of Missouri tried to cheer Coolidge by pointing to the White House and asking, in a joking tone, who might live there. "Nobody," Coolidge replied, "they just come and go.

It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness.

Black illiteracy decreased to 16.4 percent in 1930, from 45 percent in 1900. Fewer black babies died at birth—by half. Black life expectancy was rising. Most important, blacks were able to find work at about the same rates whites did. Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.

While still young, Walter was fired for organizing a rally for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party. When, in 1931, Henry Ford sold the production equipment of the Model T to the Soviet Union, Walter and Victor went over to teach Russian workers how to run assembly lines.

Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower or three years to the steerage is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.

Justice George Sutherland had led the Supreme Court in a sweeping rejection of the minimum wage in the District of Columbia. In his opinion—the case was called Adkins—Sutherland said that the minimum wage infringed on the individual's liberty to contract with his employer. The Sutherland opinion fit in with Coolidge's own general attitude, that the individual should have primacy—"All liberty is individual," he had said in a speech in 1924.

Back in 1910, word of the rise of the skyscraper in New York had panicked congressmen, who promptly zoned height limits for buildings in the District of Columbia, so that no private building could ever overshadow the Capitol.

But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy.

Why is there a struggle between capital and labor?

Others were of humbler background: those farmers who found themselves forced to kill off their piglets in a time of hunger because FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordained they must;

Coolidge weighed only 119.5 pounds, below the class average, despite a height that was slightly more than average, 68.9 inches.

Reagan told the press that he opposed family assistance: "I believe the government is supposed to promote the general welfare," Reagan said. "I don't believe it is supposed to provide it.

The New Yorker magazine's cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years.

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X." But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, "the man who never is thought of.

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

Supply creates its own demand," the classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say

Some papers were taken aback by Coolidge's sudden fame. The New York Times resented the fact that a policy it admired had been promulgated by a figure unfamiliar to its editors.

Any man of energy and initiative in this country can get what he wants out of life. But when initiative is crippled by legislation or by a tax system which denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends.

When you see government leaders really bullying business, you know that government's economic policy is failing. They get angry and they get desperate.

Entitlements seem to grow with prosperity; not only because they are indexed to inflation or GDP, but also because a prosperous country tells itself it can afford more benefits.

Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won't inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years.

Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

Young parents in America are holy and not to be messed with. If they say something is correct, we all acquiesce. And is there any man, woman or canine who doesn't leap out of the way when one of those giant, all-terrain Bugaboo strollers comes barreling down the sidewalk?