Top 200 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

Featured in: Diversity Quotes

2. “Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

3. “The surest way to be happy,” Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, “is to seek happiness for others.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

4. “I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

5. “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

6. “After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by “men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

7. “Nevertheless, no other speech proved “so effective, none so full of character and none which found so responsive an audience. It carried everything before it, and old campaigners sighed that such energy was beyond them.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

8. “They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

9. “As S. S. McClure well understood, the “vitality of democracy” depends on “popular knowledge of complex questions.” At.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

10. “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

11. “In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,” he began, “you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward.” Bunyan’s muckraker, he suggested, “typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

12. “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.” Frank.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

13. “I wish we could go back to the time when the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they directly affected their public responsibilities.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

14. “I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

15. “The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

16. “It was Andrew Jackson’s motto, he reminded, that “if you temporize, you are lost.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

17. “What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

18. “Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

19. “The only question now,” he said, “is which corpse gets the most flowers.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

20. “I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

21. “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

22. “I’ve been to the White House a number of times.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

23. “She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection, but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

24. “As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

26. “I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

27. “Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

28. “When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

29. “Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

30. “Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian’s research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

31. “The mossy marbles rest On lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

32. “Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country – bigger than all the Presidents together.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

33. “Establish a clear purpose; challenge the team to work out details; traverse conventional departmental boundaries; set large short-term and long-term targets; create tangible success to generate accelerated growth and momentum.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

34. “Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

Featured in: Reading Quotes

35. “Avoid dull facts; create memorable images; translate every issue into people’s lives; use simple, everyday language; never use big words when small words will do. Simplify the concept that “we are trying to construct a more inclusive society” into “we are going to make a country in which no one is left out.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

36. “Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life – a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

37. “As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

38. “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

39. “This acute sense of timing, one journalist observed, was the secret to Lincoln’s gifted leadership: “He always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

40. “My books are written with a strong chronological spine.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

Featured in: Strong Quotes

41. “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. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

42. “Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

43. “He called me “Bubbles,” a pet name he had chosen, he told me, because I seemed to enjoy so many things. Anxious to confirm his description, I refused to let my enthusiasm wane, even when I grew tired or grumpy. Thus excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

44. “Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

45. “More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

46. “More accustomed to relying upon himself to shape events, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination, displaying a fierce ambition, an exceptional political acumen, and a wide range of emotional strengths, forged in the crucible of personal hardship, that took his unsuspecting rivals by surprise.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

47. “Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any field – the motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

48. “I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

49. “The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

50. “It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed,” Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams in the midst of the American Revolution, suggesting that “the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin