Doris Kearns Goodwin

Historian

1943-01-04

Quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin

• Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.

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• We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation. -Teddy Roosevelt

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• I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

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• If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

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• As a nation, we began by declaring that —all men are created equal.' We now practically read it —all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read —all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty— to Russia, for instance.

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• We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation. -Teddy Roosevelt

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• Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.

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• If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

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• I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

  Read quote

• As a nation, we began by declaring that —all men are created equal.' We now practically read it —all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read —all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty— to Russia, for instance.

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• The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

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• Taft was Roosevelt's handpicked successor. I didn't know how deep the friendship was between the two men until I read their almost four hundred letters, stretching back the to early '30s. It made me realize the heartbreak when they ruptured was much more than a political division.

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• People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.

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• Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

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• Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

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• The turn of the century was the age of the banker, so much so that the leading bankers of the day had become legendary figures in the public imagination-vast, overshadowing behemoths whose colossal power seemed to reach everywhere.

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• While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn.

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• Perhaps no American family-with the possible exception of the Adams family-has had a more vivid and powerful impact on the life of their times. But the Kennedy tale-the spiral compound of glory, achievement, degradation and almost mythical tragedy-exerts a fascination upon us that goes beyond their public achievements.

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• As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.

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• I could walk with Jack [John F. Kennedy] into a room full of a hundred women, fellow Congressman and friend Frank Thompson said, and at least eighty-five of them would be willing to sacrifice their honor and everything else if they could get into a pad with him.

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