Top 200 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Such scathing criticisms moved Southern leaders to equally fierce defenses. They proclaimed slavery a “positive good” rather than a mere necessity, of immense benefit to whites and blacks alike.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

102. “If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore “the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

103. “Theodore Roosevelt’s father wrote him, “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

104. “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

105. “She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

106. “Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

107. “The vice presidency “ought to be abolished,” he told his friend Leonard Wood. “The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

108. “When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

109. “Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see – that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

110. “The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

111. “There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. “I persistently refused to lose my temper,” he recalled. “I merely explained good-humoredly that I had made up my mind.” Though he steadfastly refused.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

112. “If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be “sundered by those dreadful lines of division” that set “the haves” and the “have-nots” against one another.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

113. “Simon Cameron: “I loved my brother, as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled and struggled up the rugged hill of life’s success – but he died bravely in the discharge of his duty.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

114. “We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation.” -Teddy Roosevelt.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

115. “There is no one left; none but all of us.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

116. “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

117. “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

118. “The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

119. “A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

120. “Chance had placed him in the catapult and now it was up to the vagaries of history to cut the catapult’s rope.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

121. “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

122. “Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one’s nature.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

123. “Everything,” a journalist observed, “tended to represent the home of a man who has battled hard with the fortunes of life, and whose hard experience had taught him to enjoy whatever of success belongs to him, rather in solid substance than in showy display.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

124. “According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

125. “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

126. “It is surprising,” Roosevelt explained, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

127. “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

128. “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

129. “It seemed as though Theodore’s passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

130. “One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, “had made both sides see themselves as they are.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

131. “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

132. “Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: “He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

133. “I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

134. “He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

135. “A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

136. “The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn’t change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

137. “American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, “that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the real me!”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

138. “Though Lincoln did not drink, smoke tobacco, use profane language, or engage in games of chance, he never condescended to those who did. On the contrary, when he had addressed the Springfield Temperance Society at the height of the temperance crusade, he had insisted that “such of us as have never fallen victims, have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

139. “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.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

140. “Imagine emptying a feather pillow from the roof of your house, then trying to pick up every feather. It is seemingly impossible for us to imagine gathering all the feathers back into the pillow, so would you never be able to get the rumor you told about someone back from everyone who heard it. – analogy of the 8th Commandment by Sister Marion.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

141. “A severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis sent him to the hospital for six weeks at the end of 1918. Cautioned that he might be required to use a wheelchair for the remainder of his days, he said, “All right! I can work that way, too.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

142. “It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

143. “When I read aloud,” Lincoln later explained, “two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

144. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” Johnson liked to say. “It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

145. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” But, he famously asserted, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

146. “It was a grim and evil fate, but I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

147. “The bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency,” one Democratic speaker suspected.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

148. “At the airfield, the photographers begged for a shot. “You simply cannot do this to me,” he laughingly remarked, and they obliged, lowering their cameras. As the president’s plane took off, Churchill put his hand on American Vice-Consul Kenneth Pendar’s arm. “If anything happened to that man,” he said, “I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

149. “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

150. “Red tape must not be used to trip up little children on their way to safety.” Since visitor visas were not subject to numerical limitations, the change Eleanor advocated promised to open America’s doors to tens of thousands of refugees, and simultaneously to provide an invaluable precedent for saving countless lives in the years ahead.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin