Top 200 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

163. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

168. “Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt “the greatest of companions.” Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he told Congress. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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. “The habit of mobility had become ingrained.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

200. “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