Top 200 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people’s lives? What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

157. “A thought to God is the right way to start off my Administration,” he told them. “It will be the means to bring us out of the depths of despair.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

158. “But unlike the “electric” excitement that had filled the room four years earlier, when Nellie had sparkled with happiness and Taft had “laughed with the joy of a boy,” both the president and first lady clearly understood that the divisive convention had rendered Republican chances for election in November almost impossible.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

159. “Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. “Do not answer Bryan; attack him!” he counseled in early September, adding, “Don’t let him make the issues.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

160. “Success is not dependent on unique attributes. But ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through ambition and hard work.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

161. “He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

162. “His one passion was for the game of golf, which Roosevelt found excruciatingly dull and slow.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

163. “Find time and space in which to think. As Lincoln began to survey the darkening landscape of the war and consider a new strategy regarding slavery, he needed time to reflect upon both the constitutionality and the ramifications of issuing an emancipation order.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

164. “Fueled by his resilience, conviction, and strength of will, Lincoln gradually recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in times of anxiety it is critical to “avoid being idle,” that “business and conversation of friends” were necessary to give the mind “rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

165. “By the time they were in their late twenties, all four young men knew that they were leaders. In public service, they had found a calling. They had chosen to stand before the people and ask for their support, to make themselves vulnerable.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

166. “With “not the slightest sign of an end to the strike,” Roosevelt readied a second plan – the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate the causes of the strike and make recommendations for both executive and legislative action. Scrambling once again to find warrant for such intervention, he argued he was empowered by his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

167. “Kennedy’s death had unexpectedly brought fulfillment of his greatest ambition in circumstances that must have inspired awesome guilt and doubts.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

168. “Everything was of interest to him,” marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, “people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

169. “As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

170. “Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt’s self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

171. “If I wasn’t busy,” she replied, “I’d go crazy.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

172. “The habit of mobility had become ingrained.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

173. “Things are certainly kaleidoscopic,” Roosevelt telegraphed.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

174. “The painful apprehension within the administration mirrored the fears experienced in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the country.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

175. “Gather firsthand information, ask questions.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

176. “So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

177. “By the summer of 1933, Eleanor’s melancholy had passed. ‘The times of depression are often felt as gaps,’ a psychologist has written, ‘temporary losses of certainty or identity which leave us feeling empty.’ Seen in this light, Eleanor’s despondency was the intervening period of chaos between the breakup of her old identity as teacher and political activist in New York State and the establishment of a new identity in the White House.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

178. “Such men of “towering” egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people’s best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

179. “Still, Roosevelt noted, it was “not always easy to strike the just middle,” and he inevitably made mistakes.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

180. “His experience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization – the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters – was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of Lincoln’s future campaigns.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

181. “For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson’s domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

182. “In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

183. “They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper’s Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. “In the early days,” Fanny recalled, “we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith.” Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare. The Roosevelts.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

184. “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

185. “The experience of this campaign vindicated his belief that politics was essentially personal relations. In a twenty-minute appearance, he limited his speeches to five minutes so that he could spend the remaining fifteen minutes “touching” his audience. “A five-minute speech,” he later said, “with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen-minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

186. “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

187. “If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

188. “Survey after survey reflected a widespread conviction that extremism was the cause of Kennedy’s death. It was to this sentiment that Johnson spoke in his peroration: “Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

189. “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

190. “On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

191. “Washington will remain our political and New York our commercial capital,” Murat Halstead predicted in 1878, but cosmopolitan Cincinnati would become “the social center and musical metropolis of America.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

192. “While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

193. “If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

194. “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

195. “Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would “have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

196. “White vividly recalled sitting “pop-eyed with wonder” at the edge of his chair while Roosevelt spoke “with a kind of dynamic, burning candor” about his plans.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

197. “The more you read about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

198. “For political leaders in a democracy are not revolutionaries or leaders of creative thought. The best of them are those who respond wisely to changes and movements already under way. The worst, the least successful, are those who respond badly or not at all, and those who misunderstand the direction of already visible change.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

199. “The domestic scene,” she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, “is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

200. “If I am ever to be remembered,” Johnson wistfully told me, “it will be for civil rights.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin