Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

“Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself,”

The idle useless lonely woman of the leisure class is a thing spiritually dead.”

marriage was a cover for a great many miseries for women.

“The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.”

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

apart from their weird appreciation for tiny peas and corn so minute as to be practically “unborn,” the really very rich are awful, just as awful as anyone in, say, Garden City, Kansas.

“Everything we do is autobiographical,”