Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

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.

On the return trip, they passed a brigade of black soldiers, who rushed forward to greet the president, "screaming, yelling, shouting: 'Hurrah for the Liberator; Hurrah for the President.' Ã¢â'¬Â Their "spontaneous outburst" moved Lincoln to tears, "and his voice was so broken by emotion" that he could hardly reply.

They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that "he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.

Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;

grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

It is surprising," Roosevelt explained, "how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.

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.

Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating "all the elements of the Republican party—including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.

It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government, he observed, that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment... That men are capable of self-government.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail," Abraham Lincoln said, "without it nothing can succeed." Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection.

Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had "done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.

Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.

I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.

His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality—kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy—can also be impressive political resources.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," he wrote. "I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.

One-time rival and subsequent usurper Secretary of State Seward finally settled into an assessment of Lincoln that, His confidence and compassion increase every day.

the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.

When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country's cause.

Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could "not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.

I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war," predicted Ulysses S. Grant. "He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.

The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.

Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life—a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.