Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

When they returned home, he took his young son aside. "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should," he admonished. "You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it." Teedie responded immediately, according to Corinne, giving his father a solemn promise: "I'll make my body.

In less than half a dozen years, seemingly from nothing and from nowhere, he had risen to become a respected leader in the state legislature, a central figure in the fight for internal improvements, an instrumental force behind the planting of the new capital, and a practicing lawyer. Given his beginnings, he had traveled an immense distance; yet, given the inordinate nature of his ambition to render himself worthy of his fellow men, he had hardly begun.

Abraham Lincoln never lived to see the completion of the task he had begun with his Proclamation—the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by three-quarters of the states in December 1865.

national press. He called them by their first names, invited them

We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.

The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.

Any man who has been successful, Roosevelt repeatedly said, has leapt at opportunities chance provides.

To compound the innovative nature of the new administration, Eleanor Roosevelt held her own first press conference at the same time that day. She made a rule that only female reporters could attend, which meant that all over the country conservative publishers had to hire their first female reporters. Indeed, because of Eleanor Roosevelt's weekly press conferences, an entire generation of female journalists got their start.

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

The story is told of Lincoln's first meeting with Mary at a festive party. Captivated by her lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and dimpled smile, Lincoln reportedly said, "I want to dance with you in the worst way." And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later that night, "he certainly did.

He sought the knowledge—not easily accessible—of who had the power of decision over the particular matter in question, and, the source of authority identified, by what means influence could be exerted. This

Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne," writes George Valliant. "Humor can be marvelously therapeutic," adds another observer. "It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

Lincoln's abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders," Churchill observed in his memoirs, "but it may be doubted whether any mistake in history has equaled that of which Stalin and the Communist Chiefs were guilty when they . . . supinely awaited or were incapable of realizing, the fearful onslaught which impended upon Russia.

Roosevelt reasoned, "if the Vice-Presidency led to the Governor Generalship of the Philippines, then the question would be entirely altered." That post was the one he desired above all others, even a second gubernatorial term. From the moment the United States acquired the islands as a provision of the treaty in 1899 ending the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had coveted the job of creating a new government in a Philippines free of Spanish tyranny.

We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy," he proclaimed, "instead of taking hold of them and governing them with righteousness and justice, in the interests of their own people even more than in the interests of ours.

Observing this widespread failure to rectify conditions, Roosevelt recalled, "I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether business men or lawyers, judges, legislators, or executive officers, who seek to make of the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform.

Once Roosevelt had agreed to be drafted and assumed the responsibility of running for governor, he was in it for keeps. "When you're in politics you have to play the game," he told a friend.

but it would be "a dreadful misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole livelihood and whole happiness depend upon his staying in office. Such a feeling prevents him from being of real service to the people while in office, and always puts him under the heaviest strain to barter his convictions for the sake of holding office.

Shortly after the Kaiserin dropped anchor at Quarantine, the revenue cutter Manhattan pulled alongside

Our party, he declared, stands for "the right of property" and "the right of liberty," for institutions that have "stood the test of time," and for an economic system that rewards "energy, courage, enterprise, attention to duty, hard work, thrift, and providence" rather than "laziness, lack of attention, lack of industry, the yielding to appetite and passion.

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor

I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that