Astor Quotes

“(Truly, we are living in a second Gilded Age.)”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“Society,” concluded H. M. Ranney, “but an unjust distribution of the avails of industry, enables a few men to become rich, and consigns a great mass to hopeless poverty, with all its deprivations and degradations. . . . We are all responsible, all guilty; for we make a part of a society that has permitted thousands”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“Society,” concluded H. M. Ranney”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“The secret to the Patriarch Balls lay, as McAllister later wrote, in “making them select; in making them the most brilliant balls of each winter; in making it extremely difficult to obtain an invitation, and to make such invitations of great value; to make them the stepping stone to the best New York society.”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“The world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change,” Wharton”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“By 1850, almost half of New York City’s residents had been born abroad.”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live,” he sulked. “America is good enough for any man who has to make a livelihood, though why traveled people of independent means should remain there more than a week is not reality to be comprehended.”27 He”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“British traders, but Astor wanted more.23 He gave lip service to the company’s stated goal—to the United States government, anyway—of maintaining good trading relationships with Indigenous people to smooth the path of settlement in the West. But, in truth, his aim was single-minded: he wanted to make money. And he wanted to do it without competition from Canada or the U.S. government. Under Presidents Washington and Jefferson, the federal government had established trading posts to protect Indigenous populations.”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“It is the consciousness that someone is thinking of you, desires you, longs for the touch of your beautiful body that keeps the heart young.”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“Though Will had designed every last detail of the hotel, he set foot in it only one time in his life. When it opened with a gala party in 1893, William Waldorf Astor did not attend.”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“The indigent Astor was buried three days after his death, in the Lutheran section of All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, at the same time as a handful of other men who had died at the almshouse that week.4 Not a potter’s field burial, but not far from it. Within these unassuming boundaries unfolds a life that is as much a part of the American immigrant story as the kind celebrated by Horatio Alger in his nineteenth-century up-by-the-bootstraps fantasies. It’s a harder story, though, and one more commonly shared. Not all bootstraps go up, no matter how hard you pull.”
― Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune