Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson's domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape.

In the end, the unending strain with his father enhanced, rather than diminished, young Lincoln's ambition. Year after year, as he persevered in defiance of his father's wishes, managing his negative emotions and exercising his will to slowly master one subject after another, he developed an increasing belief in his own strengths and powers.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.

As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. "It is never well to take drastic action," he liked to say, "if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail," Abraham Lincoln said, "without it nothing can succeed.

Roosevelt's revulsion at Tolstoy's infantile, pathetic, endearing bon vivant—his categorical interpretation of healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships—reveals a deep-seated disgust with physical and moral slackness that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

With "not the slightest sign of an end to the strike," Roosevelt readied a second plan—the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate the causes of the strike and make recommendations for both executive and legislative action. Scrambling once again to find warrant for such intervention, he argued he was empowered by his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

Red tape must not be used to trip up little children on their way to safety." Since visitor visas were not subject to numerical limitations, the change Eleanor advocated promised to open America's doors to tens of thousands of refugees, and simultaneously to provide an invaluable precedent for saving countless lives in the years ahead.

If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't. So with men.

The United States paid $7.5 million for the lands, which were divided into small parcels and sold to natives, creating a new landowning class.

The majority of the great fortunes were "won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.

Kaleidoscopes and pendulums—Roosevelt's images connoted an abiding belief in the hard lesson of his crucible philosophy: All one can do is to prepare oneself, to wait in readiness for what might come.

No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a new President—or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—than that accorded to Franklin Roosevelt," White House aide Robert Sherwood observed, aligning himself with those who believe that a leader is summoned to the fore by the needs of the time.

Don't hit unless you have to, but when you hit, hit hard.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly," Leo Tolstoy wrote, "can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.

A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln's repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.

Get the books, and read and study them," he told a law student seeking advice two decades later. "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

are strengthened through sibling relationships; they learn to play, bicker, fight, and play again, to accept criticism and bounce back from hurt, to tell secrets and become intimate. "If there remained in Franklin Roosevelt throughout his life," Boettiger Jr. continued, "an insensitivity towards and discomfort with profound and vividly expressed feelings it may have been in part the lengthened shadow of his early sheltering from ugliness and jealousy and conflicting interests.

He cannot speak clearly if his words must be strained through a Congressional gag.

The springboard to the development of Lincoln's ambition can be traced to his recognition, even as a young boy, that he was gifted with an exceptionally intelligent, clear, and inquisitive mind.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt," one biographer has suggested, "is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.

No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention," Lincoln was wont to say.

The biggest danger to American stability," Johnson argued, "is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then the whole thing begins to explode. Thus it is for the sake of nothing less than stability that I consider myself a consensus man.