Top 100 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes
#1. There will be some one at the White House whom you will like more than me," Roosevelt had predicted during his final meeting with the press corps, "but not one who will interest you more.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#2. After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#3. The politician, Johnson's experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#5. I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost ... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#6. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#7. I find that without a place to work, it is difficult to work. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to the use of my books at night at home.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#8. That very afternoon, Taft fell seriously ill with what doctors mistakenly diagnosed as dengue fever. He remained bedridden for ten days, and when he returned to work, severe rectal pain prevented him from sitting. At the same time, a fungal infection developed in his groin.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#9. Modernizing the postal service was particularly important for the soldiers, who relied on letters, newspapers, and magazines from home to sustain morale.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#10. There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#11. Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one's "little cares and difficulties" disappear "into nothing.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#12. It is surprising," Roosevelt explained, "how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#13. For your penance, say two Hail Marys, three our Fathers, and," he added, with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#14. As S. S. McClure well understood, the "vitality of democracy" depends on "popular knowledge of complex questions." At
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#15. Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the columns of opposition papers.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#16. It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#18. FDR, even weakened and near the end of his life, opted to allow disabled veterans to see his true condition. This allowed them to understand the life which could still be before them.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#19. The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#21. Even Roosevelt, with his singular disciplined drive, managed to quit work early four or five afternoons each week for a game of tennis or jog through Rock Creek Park before heading
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#22. I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#23. One-time rival and subsequent usurper Secretary of State Seward finally settled into an assessment of Lincoln that, His confidence and compassion increase every day.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#26. In the reflected gaze of his (her husband's) steady admiration, she saw the face of the girl he had fallen in love with.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#27. If he (Teddy Roosevelt) lacked Will Taft's immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#28. I hated to have us take the Philippines, but I don't see how in the world we can give them up.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#29. They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#30. Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#31. It was Andrew Jackson's motto, he reminded, that if you temporize, you are lost.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#32. What is clear is that at some point my father determined he would write the story of his life himself, rather than let it be written for him by his tortured past. And this resolve was the greatest gift he bequeathed to his children.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#33. We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#34. Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#35. Roosevelt and Root deputized Taft to inform the Holy See that the United States would purchase the lands for a fair price so long as the hated friars never returned to the archipelago. The land would then be redistributed among the poor Filipino farmers.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#37. Spring had come to Washington. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. Yet the glacial mood of the capital refused to melt. Accusations
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#38. He cannot speak clearly if his words must be strained through a Congressional gag.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#39. I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#40. I think after Sandy Hook, when Obama went out, and he talked a lot about gun control and met with the parents, there was a sense that something was going to happen. But then, I guess, the power of special interests was greater than public sentiment.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#41. For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln "played the game with great zest and spirit" and "accepted success and defeat with like good nature and humor.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#42. Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#43. When he first returned to the Badlands in the summer of 1884, the austere landscape seemed to mirror his melancholy.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#45. Taft generally ate alone. Forever struggling to lose weight, he limited his midday meal to an apple or a glass of water.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#47. It soon became clear, however, that Abraham Lincoln would emerge the undisputed captain of this most unusual cabinet, truly a team of rivals. The powerful competitors who had originally disdained Lincoln became colleagues who helped him steer the country through its darkest days. Seward
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#49. Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#50. THE SUMMER OF 1863 marked a crucial transformation in the Union war effort - the organization and deployment of black regiments that would eventually amount to 180,000 soldiers, a substantial proportion of eligible black males.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#53. (Theodore) Roosevelt considered his experience with 'fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier' to be 'the most educational asset' of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#55. Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#57. He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#58. Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating all the elements of the Republican party - including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#59. Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#60. He sought the knowledge - not easily accessible - of who had the power of decision over the particular matter in question, and, the source of authority identified, by what means influence could be exerted. This
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#61. People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#62. There I go When my heart all worn by grief Sinketh low. Where my baseless hopes do lie There to find my peace, go I. Sad and slow . .
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#63. Lincoln's ability to retain his emotional balance in such difficult situations was rooted in actute self-awareness and an enormous capacity to dispel anxiety in constructive ways.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#64. Roosevelt declared, arguing that the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#65. As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#66. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#67. The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#68. The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#69. I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them. Restraining
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#70. She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection, but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#71. Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," he wrote. "I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#72. The turn of the century was the age of the banker, so much so that the leading bankers of the day had become legendary figures in the public imagination-vast, overshadowing behemoths whose colossal power seemed to reach everywhere.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#73. I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#74. The American people are strange in their attitudes toward their idols," he (Taft) mused. They lead them on and then "cut their legs from under them," simply "to make their fall all the greater.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#75. Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the disinfectant of a hearty laugh - there Taft was sent.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#76. Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#77. I trust you will have the grace to go and hang yourself rather than attempt to belittle a nation by running for the presidency,
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#78. Each party profited by the offices when in power," Roosevelt explained, "and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#79. Before any outcome was made public, the radicals had worked themselves into "a fury of rage," certain that the president "was about to give up the political fruits which had been already gathered
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#80. We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#81. (Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with "girls'stories" such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#82. 'The bully pulpit' is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#83. Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#84. A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#85. It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract," he noted, "to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form," they assume an obligation to the public.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#86. The meanest man in the world," he remarked, "is the man who forgets the old friends that helped him on an early day and over early difficulties.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#87. all relations of power rest on one thing, a contract between the leader and the followers such that the followers believe it is in their interest to follow the leader. No man can compel another - except at knifepoint - to do what he does not want to do."17
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#88. A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#89. That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#90. To Lincoln's mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#91. There is no one left," McClure exhorted his readers as he cast about for a remedy to America's woes at the turn of the twentieth century, "none but all of us.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#92. Fanny was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, he thought it a very unwomanly thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#93. The United States paid $7.5 million for the lands, which were divided into small parcels and sold to natives, creating a new landowning class.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#94. Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#95. The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements "one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores" on the city of New York. Realizing
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#96. It seemed as though Theodore's passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#97. Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#98. His fierce determination to escape an invalid's fate led him to transform his body and timid demeanor through strenuous work; Taft, on the other hand, blessed from birth with robust health, would allow his physical strength and energy to gradually dissipate over the years into a state of obesity.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#99. The former slave told his audience that there is little necessity on this occasion to speak at length and critically of this great and good man, and of his high
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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