206 Quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party – including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.

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

When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the “grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

From his early twenties, Lyndon Johnson had operated upon the premise that if “he could get up earlier and meet more people and stay up later than anybody else,” victory would be his.

It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government, “he observed, “that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment... That men are capable of self-government.

Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;.

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

Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned “losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own,” increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were “differently constituted.