206 Quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin

As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.

Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.” Until blacks “stand on level and equal ground,” we cannot rest. It must be our goal “to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.

The surest way to be happy,” Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, “is to seek happiness for others.

For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln “played the game with great zest and spirit” and “accepted success and defeat with like good nature and humor.

There is no one left,” McClure exhorted his readers as he cast about for a remedy to America’s woes at the turn of the twentieth century, “none but all of us.

Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheet a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character.

Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see – that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election.

I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words. I’m afraid it’s too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell.” Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school.

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.