Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes
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I think the most important advice is, a person doesn't have to find out right away. It's not like their first attempt at finding a profession is the only one they're going to find. I might well have gone down other paths, and it still might have been okay. But if you find something that you love, and if it keeps deepening with each new experience, then just stay with it.
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I think with Lyndon Johnson, the most important thing I learned was that he never had the sense of security that comes from inside. It always depended on other people making him feel good about himself, which meant that he was always beholden, continually needing to succeed. He could never stop. There was such a restlessness in him.
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What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. If you've done the kind of research that you're sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.
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I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.
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There is a sense of feeling larger than your own life when you're in some common mission together. You have to hope it's not going to take a war to bring that back to America again. I think another time when it seemed to be here was in the early 1960s.
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Sometimes people will find things that are wrong. Sometimes they will even find an approach that you took wrong. If you think you took the right approach, then you just absorb the criticism, but you don't change your mind.
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The turn of the century was the age of the banker, so much so that the leading bankers of the day had become legendary figures in the public imagination-vast, overshadowing behemoths whose colossal power seemed to reach everywhere.
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I think after Sandy Hook, when Obama went out, and he talked a lot about gun control and met with the parents, there was a sense that something was going to happen. But then, I guess, the power of special interests was greater than public sentiment.
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Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.
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People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.
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I think, as a president, you have to want respect. You can't look for love from the American people. You have to just do what you think is right. Some people will hate you, but others, in the long run, will respect you for what you've done.
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There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.
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My recurring nightmare is that someday I will be faced with a panel: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all of whom will be telling me everything I got wrong about them. I know that Johnson's out there saying, 'Why is it that what you wrote about the Kennedys is twice as long as the book you wrote about me?'
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The White House is such an extraordinary, simple, beautiful place. It's an extraordinary piece of our history, because it is the one thing that binds our country together. We don't have a king obviously, but we have this president, and the fact that almost all of them have lived in the same place, and so much history took place in those rooms. You can't help but feel awe-inspired by being there.
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The one thing that John Kennedy did, above all else, was to energize young people to feel that they wanted to give something to their country. I just hope, for young people of this generation, that they'll experience that feeling once again, that by working on large goals, they can do something more than their own individual ambition.
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While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn.
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I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.
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FDR once said he was like a cat, that he would pounce and then relax. That's much harder to do in the 24-hour cable world, because it's almost like the press demands of you to be saying something or doing something every day.
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They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.
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What the American Dream means to me is the fact that - what founded this country - when I think about those posters that were put up in Europe, which said, "Come to America and you'll have golden sidewalks. The land will be yours." There was something so inspirational about the fact that these immigrants from all over the world felt that here was a place of freedom, a place of opportunity.
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I think the most important thing I wanted to say at various times to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt was that it seemed so sad to me that - I really believe they loved each other and had a great deal of affection - but because of that early hurt in their marriage, there was a certain kind of distance from then on, until their deaths actually. So at times, I just wanted to push them together and say, "Come on, you guys! I know you love each other. This is crazy!"
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My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
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When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity.
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Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.