Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

To find the best authors," he boasted, "is like being able to tell good wine without the labels.

For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction of the country. After living with the subject

We are now parents. The love for our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. Edwin Stanton to his wife.

My reading was always a kind of living," he explained later, "a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.

all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

For your penance, say two Hail Marys, three our Fathers, and, he added, with a chuckle, say a special prayer for the Dodgers.

Avoid dull facts; create memorable images; translate every issue into people's lives; use simple, everyday language; never use big words when small words will do. Simplify the concept that "we are trying to construct a more inclusive society" into "we are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

no man is superior, unless it was by merit, and no man is inferior, unless by his demerit.

Lincoln was "the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.

Modernizing the postal service was particularly important for the soldiers, who relied on letters, newspapers, and magazines from home to sustain morale.

Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.

Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any field—the motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest.

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the "grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln "played the game with great zest and spirit" and "accepted success and defeat with like good nature and humor.

But the same "personal charm" that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved "dangerous" to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble of politics, from the need to fight for himself and his convictions. Had he come into the White House

To Lincoln's mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to "elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.

The mossy marbles rest On lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.

Roosevelt declared, arguing that "the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.

It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.

Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband's passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned "losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own," increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were "differently constituted.

all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It was on the meaning of the Declaration that battle lines were drawn. As

On a hot summer night in July 1836, an organized mob broke into the shop where the abolitionist weekly was printed, dismantled the press, and tore up the edition that was about to be circulated.

The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting.