Top 200 Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

156. “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

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. “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

159. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— 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. “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

165. “Gather firsthand information, ask questions.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

166. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

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

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

200. “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