Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution.

If I wasn't busy, she replied, I'd go crazy.

Nevertheless, no other speech proved "so effective, none so full of character and none which found so responsive an audience. It carried everything before it, and old campaigners sighed that such energy was beyond them.

While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.

The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements "one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores" on the city of New York. Realizing

Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would "have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of

A thought to God is the right way to start off my Administration," he told them. "It will be the means to bring us out of the depths of despair.

At the airfield, the photographers begged for a shot. "You simply cannot do this to me," he laughingly remarked, and they obliged, lowering their cameras. As the president's plane took off, Churchill put his hand on American Vice-Consul Kenneth Pendar's arm. "If anything happened to that man," he said, "I couldn't stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.

A book," Nellie confided in her diary, "has more fascination for me than anything else.

In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory—the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information—is generally considered an inborn trait.

Such men of "towering" egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people's best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.

Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment." But, he famously asserted, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The domestic scene," she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, "is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.

If ever there was a country unprepared for the war, it was the U.S. in 1940. And yet now, only four years later, the United States was clearly the most productive, most powerful country on the face of the earth.

Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people's lives? What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?

By the time they were in their late twenties, all four young men knew that they were leaders. In public service, they had found a calling. They had chosen to stand before the people and ask for their support, to make themselves vulnerable.

when I make up my mind to do a thing, I act.

The painful apprehension within the administration mirrored the fears experienced in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the country.

Wilson argued that "the wealth of America" lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. "Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago," he asserted; "it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town.

Momentum is not a mysterious mistress," Johnson liked to say. "It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.

White vividly recalled sitting "pop-eyed with wonder" at the edge of his chair while Roosevelt spoke "with a kind of dynamic, burning candor" about his plans.

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Johnson saw preoccupation with principle and procedure as a sign of impotence. Such men were "troublemakers," more concerned with appearing forceful than in exercising the real strengths that led to tangible achievement.

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt "the greatest of companions." Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.