Ron Livingston Quotes

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here's where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve- a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable-- tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it.

In the felicitous words of one early Burr biographer, “The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.

In a blatant affront to the almighty Livingstons, Hamilton threw his weight behind his thirty-four-year-old friend Rufus King, a handsome, Harvard-educated lawyer from New England who had recently moved to New York.

With finely honed political instincts, George Clinton saw that Hamilton was overreaching, and he secretly aided King’s candidacy in order to drive a wedge between the Schuylers and the Livingstons. When New York picked its second senator on July 16, 1789, Rufus King came out on top. Just as Clinton suspected, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston was irate and gradually moved into the governor’s camp.

As after any revolution, purists were vigilant for signs of ideological backsliding and departures from the one true faith. The 1780s and 1790s were to be especially rich in feverish witch hunts for traitors who allegedly sought to reverse the verdict of the war. For the radicals of the day, revolutionary purity meant a strong legislature that would overshadow a weak executive and judiciary. For Hamilton, this could only invite legislative tyranny. Rutgers v. Waddington represented his first major chance to expound the principle that the judiciary should enjoy coequal status with the other two branches of government. If Rutgers v. Waddington made Hamilton a controversial figure in city politics in 1784, the founding of the Bank of New York cast him in a more conciliatory role. The creation of New York’s first bank was a formative moment in the city’s rise as a world financial center. Banking was still a new phenomenon in America. The first such chartered institution, the Bank of North America, had been started in Philadelphia in 1781, and Hamilton had studied its affairs closely. It was the brainchild of Robert Morris, and its two biggest shareholders were Jeremiah Wadsworth and Hamilton’s brother-in-law John B. Church. These two men now cast about for fresh outlets for their capital. In 1783, John Church sailed for Europe with Angelica and their four children to settle wartime accounts with the French government. In his absence, Church named Hamilton as his American business agent, a task that was to consume a good deal of his time in coming years. When Church and Wadsworth deputized him to set up a private bank in New York, Hamilton warmed to it as a project that could help to rejuvenate New York commerce. He was stymied by a competing proposal from Robert R. Livingston to set up a “land bank”—so called because the initial capital would be pledged mostly in land, an idea Hamilton derided as a “wild and impracticable scheme.” 49 Since land is not a liquid asset and cannot be converted into ready cash in an emergency, Hamilton favored a more conservative bank that would conduct business exclusively in notes and gold and silver coins. When Livingston solicited the New York legislature for a charter, the tireless Hamilton swung into action and mobilized New York’s merchants against the effort. He informed Church that he had lobbied “some of the most intelligent merchants, who presently saw the matter in a proper light and began to take measures to defeat the plan.

Hamilton was more persuasive than he realized, and a delegation of business leaders soon approached him to subscribe to a “money-bank” that would thwart Livingston’s land bank. “I was a little embarrassed how to act,” Hamilton confessed sheepishly to Church, “but upon the whole I concluded it best to fall in with them.” 51 Instead of launching a separate bank, Hamilton decided to represent Church and Wadsworth on the board of the new bank. Ironically, he held in his own name only a single share of the bank that was long to be associated with his memory. On February 23, 1784, The New-York Packet announced a landmark gathering: “It appearing to be the disposition of the gentlemen in this city to establish a bank on liberal principles . . . they are therefore hereby invited to meet tomorrow evening at six o’clock at the Merchant’s Coffee House, where a plan will be submitted to their consideration.” 52 At the meeting, General Alexander McDougall was voted the new bank’s chairman and Hamilton a director. Snatching an interval of leisure during the next three weeks, Hamilton drafted, singlehandedly, a constitution for the new institution—the sort of herculean feat that seems almost commonplace in his life. As architect of New York’s first financial firm, he could sketch freely on a blank slate. The resulting document was taken up as the pattern for many subsequent bank charters and helped to define the rudiments of American banking. In the superheated arena of state politics, the bank generated fierce controversy among those upstate rural interests who wanted a land bank and believed that a money bank would benefit urban merchants to their detriment. Within the city, however, the cause of the Bank of New York made improbable bedfellows, reconciling radicals and Loyalists who were sparring over the treatment of confiscated wartime properties.

In his response to Livingston, Hamilton made clear that some family members thought he was excessively preoccupied by the opposite sex. “I exercise [my pen] at the [risk] of being anathematized by grave censors for dedicating so much of my time to so trifling and insignificant a toy as—woman.” Though Livingston, apparently, had spurned his advances—he chides her apathy—he concludes philosophically that “I shall probably be in a fine way” and tells her that “ALL FOR LOVE is my motto.