206 Quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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.

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

Perhaps no American family-with the possible exception of the Adams family-has had a more vivid and powerful impact on the life of their times. But the Kennedy tale-the spiral compound of glory, achievement, degradation and almost mythical tragedy-exerts a fascination upon us that goes beyond their public achievements.

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.

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.

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

(from John Hay's diary) “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.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

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.