Vanderbilt Quotes

“They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing,”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“In 1920, shortly before he died, he was quoted in the New York Times saying, “My life was never destined to be quite happy. . . . Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin,” she reflected. “Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“A few central myths appear again and again in Americans’ popular imagination: that success is available to anyone who is willing to work hard, for example, and that success is worthier of celebration if it is achieved without help.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“At the very least,” she’d written to me once, “when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Poor Vanderbilt! How I pity you; and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you. Don’t misunderstand me, Vanderbilt. I know you own seventy millions; but then you know and I know, that it isn’t what a man has, that constitutes wealth. No—it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. —MARK TWAIN, PACKARD’S MONTHLY, MARCH 1869”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“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.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“For, as William Dean Howells once noted, “Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself,” and it is only a step from this to arrive at something which passes muster for a Society definition of America: that all men may be born equal but most of us spend the better part of our born days in trying to be as unequal as we can. —Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society?”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Women [are] dwarfed not developed by competition. . . . What men did not want to do, they said was women’s sphere. If a woman is natural[,] a man does not want her. This makes of woman a liar and a pretender. A woman is an actress who plays to an audience of men. They know what will be applauded and what will be hissed.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“A fortune of a million,” McAllister remarked to the New York Tribune, “is only respectable poverty.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“My life was never destined to be quite happy. . . . Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Alva embodied a curious contradiction in that she felt she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“the invention of celebrity, a concept made possible by new technologies for the cheap dissemination of images.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“This is the story of the extraordinary rise and epic fall of the Vanderbilt dynasty. This is the story of the greatest American fortune ever squandered.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio. They were filled with journals, and documents, and letters. She saved everything. Handwritten notes from her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and schoolbooks my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt doodled in as a child. I found old wills and financial records, and as I read the contents of these files stained by time and mold, I began to hear the voices of those people I never knew.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“The most shocking costume, however, was neither an abstract concept nor a famous aristocrat lending Old World cachet to New World wealth. Writing in his memoir, Ward McAllister recalled that the most remarkable costume at the famous Vanderbilt ball was that of a young woman, Miss Kate Fearing Strong, who came dressed as a cat. Her costume consisted of a gown made of white cat tails with a bodice of skinned cat heads and was topped with a hat made of a taxidermied white cat curled up and perched upon her heaps of blond curls. Around her throat, Miss Strong wore a black velvet ribbon with a bell and the word puss spelled out on the choker in large diamond letters.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“nascitur non fit;”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“The visitor center would be built on the grounds of The Breakers. It would even sell sandwiches.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“the Gilded Age—the name given by Mark Twain to the glittering years from the 1870s until around 1900—New York society was personified by two inscrutable consuls,”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Some women are bred from the beginning to be perfect specimens for men,”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“Woman’s emancipation means education of men as well as women,” Alva insisted. “The mating of the future which will be a success will be founded on the truth of being. We are not only making a new woman—we are making a new man. We are not only bringing forth the truth in women but making men desire the truth.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“If you smoke on a sailboat, flip your ashes or discard your cigarette on the side the sail is on, so the wind won’t blow sparks or ashes or butts back into the boat. —Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette,”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“On his Grand Tour, McAllister made a careful study of all aspects of social life: court manners, architecture, fashion, food, drink, watering spots, dances. He returned to the United States as what one contemporary called “the most complete dandy in America,” and established himself in New York as essentially a professional snob.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“But Truman Capote wasn’t interested in humanizing Gloria Vanderbilt, even while he floated in her majestic swimming pool. Instead, he wanted to resent her.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“One of the tall, thin, beautiful women whom Capote christened “swans” as he began to carve his path into literary and social New York was Gloria Vanderbilt. Gloria had spent much of her twenties in New York City pursuing artistic dreams of her own, first in painting and then, later, in theater. She was at a crossroads in her second marriage, to Leopold Stokowski, forty-two years her senior, and beginning to feel like her most secret heart was withering in the face of his control and disapproval. She yearned to break free, but was young and unsure of herself and didn’t know how. Years later, she recalled that “waiting on the other side of the glass wall I could see a tiny pied piper.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“She was a symbol of an era, of a set of values or experiences—the way that money can bend and warp relationships, the way that one family’s ambition can either uplift or infect the members of that family, sometimes for good, but more often than we might think, for ill. The way that American inequality in the Gilded Age could echo and reverberate all the way into the late twentieth century.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

“U.S. Supreme Court challenging the legal basis of the monopoly. Cornelius moved his young family from what is now called Staten Island to New Brunswick, New Jersey, which was a stop on the steamship ferry line that he was now managing. His wife, Sophia, opened an inn and used the rich profits she was able to generate to feed and clothe their growing brood of children. Vanderbilt, meanwhile, went to Washington, DC, and hired attorney Daniel Webster to argue for the overturn of the monopoly. On March 2, 1824, the Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons’s favor in Gibbons v. Ogden, a case still cited frequently today, which marked the turn in America from monopolies to markets. The case doesn’t bear Vanderbilt’s name, and he didn’t appear in the news around it, but it is covered in his fingerprints in its declaring that individual states had no standing to interfere with interstate commerce. The last of the protected Dutch-era monopolies were washed away in the unfettered competitive churn of steamboats plying between New York and New Jersey. That seawater churn would froth higher and higher, heaping up great clouds of profit around the descendants of Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, to a level that a seventeenth-century indentured servant or an eighteenth-century farmer who owed one horse to his militia could never have possibly imagined.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty