Top 200 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

181. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

196. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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