Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
'The bully pulpit' is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.
I really believe that what happens one day affects the next, and I think that came from that experience of learning that if I told the score inning by inning, play by play, it built up to its natural climax.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
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.
People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.
I've been to the White House a number of times.
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.
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.
A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.
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.
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.
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.
Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
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.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
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 shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.
Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
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 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.
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. So the dimensions of it will be seen differently by different people.
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.
As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question.
Politicians generally form alliances and not friendships. Individuals and institutions achieve their ends through continual barter. But deals are not bonds. Indeed, intense emotional involvement with anything - with issues, ideology, a woman, even a family - can be a handicap, not only consuming valuable time, but more importantly, reducing flexibility and the capacity for detached calculation needed to take maximum advantage of continually changing circumstances.
I keep thinking that history runs in cycles, and that some day certain large issues will come before the country again. There will be leaders that inspire young people. I don't think it means that it's over forever, but I'm getting pretty impatient. I'm hoping it comes soon, so that my young people can know that experience that we knew in the '60s, and that the World War II generation knew during the '40s.
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.
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.
One of the important qualities that I think is often overlooked is just energy. It's vitality, and sort of a life force that some people have and others don't. Probably that is connected to a love of whatever it is that they're doing. Another quality that I think is central is confidence. Again, some people are more blessed with that than others.
Lyndon Johnson is still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life. He was huge, a huge character, not only standing six feet four, but when you talked to him, he violated the normal human space between people. He was a great storyteller. The problem was that half his stories, I discovered, weren't true.
Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.
Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.
I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.
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.
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.
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.
I think some people who go into public life, if they go in needing the applause of thousands, they're never going to work out successfully in the end, because they don't know who they are apart from the crowds.
Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I learned, more than anything, was that you can't have it all balanced perfectly at any one time. When I was young, it was much more balanced toward work. When I had my children, it was much more balanced toward love and family, and I didn't get a lot of work done. So you can't ask of it to be perfectly balanced at any time, but your hope is, before you die, you've somehow had each of those spheres come to life. That's probably more important than success in any one of those spheres alone.
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.
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. We are still too near to his greatness,' (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, 'but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.' (748)
Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in.
I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.
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.
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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