Quotes About Legacy

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory.

For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson's domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a new President—or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—than that accorded to Franklin Roosevelt," White House aide Robert Sherwood observed, aligning himself with those who believe that a leader is summoned to the fore by the needs of the time.

My father was the best man I ever knew," Roosevelt later said. "He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness

I'm giving my whole life to breaking the butterfly of a John Rockefeller upon the wheel of my ponderous articles

At the Second Inaugural, Lincoln asked his countrymen "to strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." These same words nourished Franklin Roosevelt. He drew upon them, he said, because Abraham Lincoln had set goals for the future "in terms of which the human mind cannot improve.

Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?

Abraham Lincoln never lived to see the completion of the task he had begun with his Proclamation—the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by three-quarters of the states in December 1865.

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.

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

Lyndon was his father's shadow and replica.

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.

We have but a short life to live here my dear friend. But let us make it long by noble deeds.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

What is clear is that at some point my father determined he would write the story of his life himself, rather than let it be written for him by his tortured past. And this resolve was the greatest gift he bequeathed to his children.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

The tale must be rehearsed–and we may amuse ourselves imagining how these must have been, often, acrimonious, or at least in dispute. Whose version of events is going to be committed to memory by the Memories?

I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.

Younger woman says, "I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad." "Yes," [older woman responds] "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?