Quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin

(Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with girlsstories such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.

Edith (the future Mrs. Teddy Roosevelt) developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do, she would write seven decades later.

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.

The American people are strange in their attitudes toward their idols, he (Taft) mused. They lead them on and then cut their legs from under them, simply to make their fall all the greater.

Theodore Roosevelts father wrote him, I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

We are now parents. The love for our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. Edwin Stanton to his wife.

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.

The very qualities that had led to Johnsons political and legislative success were precisely those that now operated to destroy him: his inward insistence that the world adapt itself to his goals; his faith in the nations limitless capacity; his tendency to evaluate all human activity in terms of its political significance; his insistence on translating every disruptive situation into one where bargaining was possible; his reliance on personal touch; his ability to speak to each of his constituent groups on its own terms. All these gifts, instead of sustaining him, now conspired to destroy him.

Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

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.

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.

Taft was Roosevelts handpicked successor. I didnt 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.

The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.