Words matter. These are the best Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Roosevelt’s strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
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.
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.
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.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
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.
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.
I’ve been to the White House a number of times.
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.
My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
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.
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.
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.
‘The bully pulpit’ is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
