Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.

How did the team accomplish so much, so quickly, and for so long? The answers require an appreciation of Johnson's unsurpassed work ethic, the feeling among staff members that they were learning important skills, and the sense of shared engagement in a significant mission.

My library has been the greatest possible pleasure to me," he wrote to his parents during his freshman year, "as whenever I have any spare time I can immediately take up a book. Aunt Annie's present, the 'History of the Civil War,' is extremely interesting." From early childhood, he had regarded books as "the greatest of companions." And once encountered, they were never forgotten

Roosevelt seemed to feel," Harrison remarked, "that everything ought to be done before sundown.

Put ambition for the collective interest above self-interest.

The press of visitors, a New York Times reporter observed, never seemed "to try the President's strength or impair his good temper." At one o'clock, Roosevelt

He always carried a book with him to the Executive Office," Taft noted, "and although there were but few intervals during the business hours, he made the most of them in his reading.

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life," Edith later wrote, "and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.

What is well-spoken must be yoked to what is well-thought. And such thought is the product of great labor, "the drudgery of the law.

Charles Washburn, a classmate at Harvard, considered Roosevelt's ability to concentrate a signal ingredient to his success. "If he were reading," observed Washburn with astonishment, "the house might fall about his head, he could not be diverted.

Even Roosevelt, with his singular disciplined drive, managed to quit work early four or five afternoons each week for a game of tennis or jog through Rock Creek Park before heading

There is now nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me.

At this introductory stage of his career, Roosevelt viewed politics in a puritanical light, as an arena where good battled evil. He had seen his father's dreams of high office undone by corruption; he had absorbed his father's warning that the country could not much longer stand "so corrupt a government.

With the coal strike, Theodore Roosevelt had grasped the historical moment that signaled the clear emergence of a domestic purpose for his young administration—to restrain the rampant consolidation of corporate wealth that had developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The speed and size of that consolidation, Roosevelt powerfully felt, "accentuates the need of the Government having some power of supervision and regulation over such corporations.

In Eleanor's judgment, her husband was better able to meet the tension than many of the others, "because he'd learned from polio that if there was nothing you could do about a situation, then you'd better try to put it out of your mind and go on with your work at hand.

How children dance," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "to the unlived lives of their parents

Largely to gain Nellie's approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. "Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he writes," he told her. "His heroes have failings human character is heir to, and we like them none the less on that account.

Roosevelt saw everything, grasped the sense of everything, and formed an opinion on everything which he was eager to maintain at any risk.

As Roosevelt took his place in the open carriage leading the procession, an additional surprise lay in store for him: 150 members of his Rough Rider unit, whom he had led so brilliantly in the Spanish-American War, appeared on horseback to serve as his escort of honor.

Time is the most valuable thing you have; be sure you spend it well

What convinces is conviction," Johnson liked to say. "You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing." In this instance, Johnson spoke directly from the heart.

of bed rest. Thee feared that his son was

by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.

While some men, he observed, were naturally fearless, he had to train his "soul and spirit" as well as his body. So, "constantly forcing himself to do the difficult or even dangerous thing," he gradually was able to cultivate courage as "a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will-power.