Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

Notwithstanding a statewide Democratic sweep, he had gained a second term, and despite his youth, he had been chosen by his Republican colleagues as their minority leader.

Regardless of one's impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

Roosevelt insisted that politics was not a proper occupation. As a citizen, one might intermittently engage in political activity but it would be a deadfall 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 all of it puts him under the heavy astrain to barter his conviction for the stake of holding office.

Lincoln warned, the lawyer must not rely on rhetorical glibness or persuasiveness alone. 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." Without that labor, without that drudgery, the most eloquent words lack gravity and power.

build one would think to be whirled lightly over an

no one knew better than Lincoln that words have consequences. In a world of tinder, he was determined to hold his rhetorical gifts in abeyance in order to reach across factions and avoid a single spark that could set loose an avoidable conflagration.

The world was far more complicated and nuanced than his categorical moral vision had led him to believe. The ability to learn from the excesses of his egocentric behavior, to alter course, to profit from error, was essential to his growth.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, "need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

Lyndon was his father's shadow and replica.

Indeed, "the leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow that can be done to-day." The key to success, he insisted, is "work, work, work.

Stone that whenever the president "gave the word," the governor should formally request federal troops, thus triggering the sole constitutional

The incident suggests Roosevelt's developing sense of empathy. While Lincoln's seems to have been his by right of birth, Roosevelt slowly expanded his understanding of other people's points of view by going to places that a man of his background typically neither visited nor comprehended.

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply.

Nothing so extraordinary has ever happened in American politics," a dazed Harold Ickes wrote. "Here was a man—a Democrat until a couple of years ago—who, without any organization went into a Republican National Convention and ran away with the nomination for President . 

all relations of power rest on one thing, a contract between the leader and the followers such that the followers believe it is in their interest to follow the leader. No man can compel another—except at knifepoint—to do what he does not want to do."17

It was this case," Roosevelt later said, "which first waked me to . . . the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.

These statements of belief are consonant with the assumption of pluralist thought that if people do not exclusively identify themselves with a single category—such as class, occupation, or system of belief—political cleavages will be limited in intensity.

While the justices were well intentioned, they interpreted law solely from the vantage point of the propertied classes. "They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions," he charged, "they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities." In

TR regarded procrastination as a sin. Preparing ahead - Freedom from anxiety.

An indifferent student at Groton, Harvard College, and Columbia Law, Franklin ostensibly was following an expected path for a member of the privileged class by joining an old, conservative Wall Street law firm.

I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.

Eleanor had defended over the years, that the money spent on arms would be much better spent on education and medical care.

Find ways to save face.

When the story of the war comes to be written," Harold Ickes testified at the hearings, "if it has to be written that it was lost, it may be because of the recalcitrance of ALCOA.