Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in.

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

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.

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.

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.

He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.

People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.

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.

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.

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.

An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.

As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question.

I wish we could go back to the time when the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they directly affected their public responsibilities.

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.

It took me five years on Lyndon Johnson, ten years on the Kennedys, six years on the Roosevelts. Inevitably, you get shaped by the people that you're thinking about during that period of time.

A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.

I've been to the White House a number of times.

They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.

People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.

If your ambition comes at the price of an unbalanced life, that there's nothing else that gives you comfort but success, it's not worth it.

Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, "armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

One-time rival and subsequent usurper Secretary of State Seward finally settled into an assessment of Lincoln that, "His confidence and compassion increase every day.

The habit of mobility had become ingrained.

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, "had made both sides see themselves as they are.

She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection, but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

If he (Teddy Roosevelt) lacked Will Taft's immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality.

(Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with "girls'stories" such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.

Edith (the future Mrs. Teddy Roosevelt) developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. "I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do, " she would write seven decades later.

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

According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.

Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

We are now parents. The love for our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. Edwin Stanton to his wife.

In the reflected gaze of his (her husband's) steady admiration, she saw the face of the girl he had fallen in love with.