Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes
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“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 Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns GoodwinSource : "Doris Kearns Goodwin: Living With the Presidents". Interview with Susan Sarfati, www.pcmaconvene.org. January 1, 2014.
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“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 the Kennedy tale-the spiral compound of glory, achievement, degradation and almost mythical tragedy-exerts a fascination upon us that goes beyond their public achievements.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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 were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“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 in the public imagination-vast, overshadowing behemoths whose colossal power seemed to reach everywhere.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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 Boston bank.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“My books are written with a strong chronological spine.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“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 sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.”
-- Doris Kearns GoodwinSource : K. M. Kostyal, Doris Kearns Goodwin (2009). “Abraham Lincoln's extraordinary era: the man and his times”, Natl Geographic Society
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“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together. We are still too near to his greatness,' (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, 'but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.' (748)”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“(from John Hay's diary) “The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,†Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“all through my childhood, my father kept from me the knowledge that the daily papers printed daily box scores, allowing me to believe that without my personal renderings of all those games he missed while he was at work, he would be unable to follow our team in the only proper way a team should be followed, day by day, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love for baseball would be forever incomplete.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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 things will really become troubling.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.”
-- 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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“My recurring nightmare is that someday I will be faced with a panel: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all of whom will be telling me everything I got wrong about them. I know that Johnson's out there saying, 'Why is it that what you wrote about the Kennedys is twice as long as the book you wrote about me?”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“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.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
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“I've been to the White House a number of times.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
“A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.”
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin
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