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

152. “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

153. “Don’t hit till you have to; but, when you do hit, hit hard.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

154. “In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory – the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information – is generally considered an inborn trait.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

155. “Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

156. “Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

160. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

162. “Gather firsthand information, ask questions.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

185. “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

186. “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

187. “On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal – not to debate – his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

188. “As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. “It is never well to take drastic action,” he liked to say, “if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

189. “It was said in the office “that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

190. “If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn’t just occur. It’s not like a scientific event. It’s a human event.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

191. “Johnson saw preoccupation with principle and procedure as a sign of impotence. Such men were “troublemakers,” more concerned with appearing forceful than in exercising the real strengths that led to tangible achievement.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

192. “Roosevelt repeatedly “brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

193. “The worsening context of the war, which threatened the survival of the Union and the Constitution itself, provided a suitable resolution to this dilemma.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

194. “A book,” Nellie confided in her diary, “has more fascination for me than anything else.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

195. “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

196. “What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

197. “There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

198. “Moreover, Lincoln, unlike the brooding Chase, possessed a life-affirming humor and a profound resilience that lightened his despair and fortified his will.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

199. “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

200. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin