Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

40 quotes in 760 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
• Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in…
• The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
• Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and…
• 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…
• Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.
• I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
• My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
• The turn of the century was the age of the banker, so much so that the leading bankers of the day had become legendary figures…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
• A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.
• I've been to the White House a number of times.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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