206 Quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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.

Such scathing criticisms moved Southern leaders to equally fierce defenses. They proclaimed slavery a “positive good” rather than a mere necessity, of immense benefit to whites and blacks alike.

More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.

There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. “I persistently refused to lose my temper,” he recalled. “I merely explained good-humoredly that I had made up my mind.” Though he steadfastly refused.

They were stealin’ votes in east Texas,” Johnson supporter and Austin mayor Tom Miller recalled, “we were stealin’ votes in south Texas, only Jesus Christ could say who actually won it.” But Jesus wasn’t counting, and, by an eighty-seven-vote margin, “Landslide Lyndon” attained the Senate seat he had coveted for so long.

If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be “sundered by those dreadful lines of division” that set “the haves” and the “have-nots” against one another.

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way.

Lincoln was “the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.

Before any outcome was made public, the radicals had worked themselves into “a fury of rage,” certain that the president “was about to give up the political fruits which had been already gathered.