Quotes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.

Imagine emptying a feather pillow from the roof of your house, then trying to pick up every feather. It is seemingly impossible for us to imagine gathering all the feathers back into the pillow, so would you never be able to get the rumor you told about someone back from everyone who heard it. - analogy of the 8th Commandment by Sister Marion

A severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis sent him to the hospital for six weeks at the end of 1918. Cautioned that he might be required to use a wheelchair for the remainder of his days, he said, "All right! I can work that way, too.

if ever an argument can be made for the conclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When I read aloud," Lincoln later explained, "two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.

Washington will remain our political and New York our commercial capital," Murat Halstead predicted in 1878, but cosmopolitan Cincinnati would become "the social center and musical metropolis of America.

Teddy Roosevelt had relished every hour of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the dull thud he would experience upon returning to private life.

The politician, Johnson's experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.

If this were so; it meant the people I knew didn't belong in the governing class. And the other people did. And I intended to be in the governing class. If they proved too hard for me I would quit, but until I made the effort I would not quit. And find out if I was too weak to hold my own. -Theodore Roosevelt

he had predicted that the "rock of class hatred" was "the greatest and most dangerous rock in the course of any republic," that disaster would follow when "two sections, or two classes are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other's passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view.

Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation's bloodstream.

idea that government should be used to help those who needed help—the poor, the undereducated, the ill-housed, the elderly, the sick.

Success is not dependent on unique attributes. But ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through ambition and hard work.

Everything was of interest to him," marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, "people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.

Success is not dependent on unique attributes. But ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through ambition and hard work. -Theodore Roosevelt

Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes.

Progressives (a combination of Midwestern

Death had brushed hard against him

FDR, even weakened and near the end of his life, opted to allow disabled veterans to see his true condition. This allowed them to understand the life which could still be before them.

power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

persuaded editors and publishers at a dozen leading

The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

It was said in the office "that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.