Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes
-
I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.
-
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.
-
“The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.
-
What interested me most about the Kennedys was the family situation. Somehow, they had created this family that lasted over time, they had a sense of connection to one another. Especially now, when people are spread all over the country and they don't see grandparents and parents, this family bonded together.
-
You can't start out at 20 in whatever your profession is and say, "I want to win an Olympic medal," or "I want to become president," or "I want to win the Pulitzer Prize." If you love what you're doing, it's sort of a nice thing that happens toward the end of your career, or in the middle of your career. It is not the reason you were doing it. The reason you were doing it is because every day you wake up in the morning and you can't wait to learn something new.
-
Journalism still, in a democracy, is the essential force to get the public educated and mobilized to take action on behalf of our ancient ideals.
-
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
-
Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.
-
Taft was Roosevelt's handpicked successor. I didn't know how deep the friendship was between the two men until I read their almost four hundred letters, stretching back the to early '30s. It made me realize the heartbreak when they ruptured was much more than a political division.
-
'The bully pulpit' is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.
-
Many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won't get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.
-
When I look at Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, I think the most important quality he had during the Depression and the war was this absolute confidence in himself, in his country, really in the American people. He was able to exude that confidence and almost project it.
-
I've been to the White House a number of times.
-
Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.
-
Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
-
He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
-
I think that's still what the American Dream means: that with perseverance, with hard work, you can become something, that the classes won't prevent you from becoming, that there's a movement up that ladder with hard work.
-
Obama does seem to have what both FDR and Lincoln had, which is the recognition that you have to hold back at times and then wait to come forward.
-
Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
-
An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.
-
The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.
-
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
-
I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along.
-
I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.