There is something warm and appealing and cozy about this picture of the human race marching forward, locked arm in arm and mind to mind; and there are insecure ages in life and insecure people in life to whom this vision of progress by phalanx brings comfort and strength. But I, for one, think this is nonsense socially and scientifically. [T]here is no such thing as group originality or group creativity or group perspicacity. I do believe wholeheartedly in the individual capacity for greatness. Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds. By very definition things which we care about most—the important breakthroughs—do not occur spontaneously in multiple because they are the result of a very special way of seeing, by a very special mind.

Frick was a fighter, and when war loomed, he prepared himself for it. In Frick’s mind, the fact that shooting had started at Homestead was the fault of the union; if the men had listened to reason and behaved in a law-abiding fashion, there would have been no violence. And the end result would have been the same. Frick saw his own approach as direct and at least honest, if brutal. He viewed Carnegie’s tactics as underhanded by comparison.

Frick is in the running for the greatest COO of all time. One of the best pure execution machines.

The treasures of the world which books contain were opened to me at the right moment. The fundamental advantage of a library is that it gives nothing for nothing. Youths must acquire knowledge themselves. There is no escape from this.

An extremely inaccurate view of events, but useful to peer into the psychology of one of history's most powerful men.

Capitalism, I began to understand, was not so much a top-down imposed system but, rather, an evolutionary result of letting people choose their own economic paths. And if economic freedom was the foundation of capitalism, then both cooperation and competition seemed to be the essential engines that made it run.

Perhaps one of the few true political centrists.