Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the "unmelodious" clamor of city life replacing the "rhythmical" sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded "local horrors" into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among "the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman.

There is no one left; none but all of us.

Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion.

The choice of Blaine "speaks badly for the intelligence of the mass of my party," he ruefully continued. "It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool." Still,

The biggest danger to American stability," Johnson argued, "is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then the whole thing begins to explode. Thus it is for the sake of nothing less than stability that I consider myself a consensus man.

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

When they returned home, he took his young son aside. "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should," he admonished. "You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it." Teedie responded immediately, according to Corinne, giving his

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," he wrote. "I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.

I hated to have us take the Philippines, but I don't see how in the world we can give them up.

But unlike the "electric" excitement that had filled the room four years earlier, when Nellie had sparkled with happiness and Taft had "laughed with the joy of a boy," both the president and first lady clearly understood that the divisive convention had rendered Republican chances for election in November almost impossible.

Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.

She could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed, and irritable the next. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was "either in the garret or cellar." In either mood, she needed attention, something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.

I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.

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

People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.

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

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.

It soon became clear, however, that Abraham Lincoln would emerge the undisputed captain of this most unusual cabinet, truly a team of rivals. The powerful competitors who had originally disdained Lincoln became colleagues who helped him steer the country through its darkest days. Seward

Everything," a journalist observed, "tended to represent the home of a man who has battled hard with the fortunes of life, and whose hard experience had taught him to enjoy whatever of success belongs to him, rather in solid substance than in showy display.

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

It seemed as though Theodore's passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her.

Fanny was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, he thought it a very unwomanly thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men.

A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.

The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.

Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the columns of opposition papers.

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

(Theodore) Roosevelt considered his experience with 'fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier' to be 'the most educational asset' of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president.

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply.

Our party, he declared, stands for "the right of property" and "the right of liberty," for institutions that have "stood the test of time," and for an economic system that rewards "energy, courage, enterprise, attention to duty, hard work, thrift, and providence" rather than "laziness, lack of attention, lack of industry, the yielding to appetite and passion.

When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country's cause.

When Prince Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte III, visited Washington in early August, Mary organized an elaborate dinner party. She found the task of entertaining much simpler than it had been in Springfield days. "We only have to give our orders for the dinner, and dress in proper season," she wrote her friend Hannah Shearer. Having learned French when she was young, she conversed easily with the prince. It was a "beautiful dinner," Lizzie Grimsley recalled, "beautifully served, gay conversation in which the French tongue predominated." Two days later, her interest in French literature apparently renewed, Mary requested Volume 9 of the Oeuvres de Victor Hugo from the Library of Congress.

My recurring nightmare is that someday I will be faced with a panel: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all of whom will be telling me everything I got wrong about them. I know that Johnson's out there saying, 'Why is it that what you wrote about the Kennedys is twice as long as the book you wrote about me?'

THE SUMMER OF 1863 marked a crucial transformation in the Union war effort - the organization and deployment of black regiments that would eventually amount to 180,000 soldiers, a substantial proportion of eligible black males.

Corinne suggested a different reason, indicating that her dying father had expressed concern about Theodore's intimacy with Edith, given Charles Carow's fiscal and temperamental instability. If Theodore discussed the issue with Edith that night, he might well have triggered the volatility that he would obscurely explain to Bamie as a clash of tempers "that were far from being of the best.

Not everyone was meant to be No. 1.

It is surprising," Roosevelt explained, "how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.

Became postmaster general, and Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's "Mars," eventually became secretary

The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State . . . and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.

Hearst's papers and magazines" were his intended target and promised his speech would clarify that he abhorred "the whitewash brush quite as much as of mud slinging.

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

Nothing so extraordinary has ever happened in American politics," a dazed Harold Ickes wrote. "Here was a man - a Democrat until a couple of years ago - who, without any organization went into a Republican National Convention and ran away with the nomination for President .

I trust you will have the grace to go and hang yourself rather than attempt to belittle a nation by running for the presidency,

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract," he noted, "to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form," they assume an obligation to the public.

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.

America was a special country, because, despite the diversity of our racial, religious, and ethnic origins, we were all one nation, one people with a shared set of values and a common culture.

Roosevelt had defined the public interest in the previously private struggle between labor and capital.

The majority of the great fortunes were "won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.

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

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.

The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one's nature.

No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." Frank

All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good-natured." Caricatures even transformed his failure during a mid-November bear hunt into a triumph, conjuring an image of the president steadfastly refusing to shoot a small bear furnished for the occasion. As renditions of the original Clifford Berryman cartoon proliferated, the bear dwindled in size until he appeared as a tiny cub, prompting toy store owners to market stuffed bears in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Soon the Teddy bear became one of the most cherished toys of all time.

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.

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

Edith (the future Mrs. Teddy Roosevelt) developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. "I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do," she would write seven decades later.

Although the guilty verdict surprised few, the size of the resulting fine stunned the company and the country. For each of the 1,462 carloads of oil that had enjoyed an illegal rebate, Landis levied the highest possible fine, $20,000, generating a spectacular cumulative total of $29,240,000. Commenting on the hefty charge, Mark Twain drolly remarked that the sum evoked the bride's proverbial astonishment on the morning after her wedding: I expected it but didn't suppose it would be so big.

A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.

Attempting to circumvent this declaration, Hunter recalled that Charles I of England had entered repeatedly into arrangements with his adversaries despite ongoing hostilities. "I do not profess to be posted in history," Lincoln answered. "On all such matters I will turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.

Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.

Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

We have a solemn responsibility to cooperate with the President and produce a program that is neither his blueprint nor our blueprint but a combination of the two.

Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging war on the railroads that ruled his state.

The story is told of Lincoln's first meeting with Mary at a festive party. Captivated by her lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and dimpled smile, Lincoln reportedly said, "I want to dance with you in the worst way." And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later that night, "he certainly did.

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.

As Roosevelt took his place in the open carriage leading the procession, an additional surprise lay in store for him: 150 members of his Rough Rider unit, whom he had led so brilliantly in the Spanish-American War, appeared on horseback to serve as his escort of honor.

The vice presidency "ought to be abolished," he told his friend Leonard Wood. "The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'

As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

Roosevelt repeatedly brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.

That very afternoon, Taft fell seriously ill with what doctors mistakenly diagnosed as dengue fever. He remained bedridden for ten days, and when he returned to work, severe rectal pain prevented him from sitting. At the same time, a fungal infection developed in his groin.

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.

We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.

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

The failed deal crushed McClure, precipitating a nervous breakdown in April 1900 that propelled him to Europe to undergo the celebrated "rest-cure" devised by an American physician, S. Weir Mitchell. Prescribed for a range of nervous disorders, the rest cure required that patients remain isolated for weeks or even months at a time, forbidden to read or write, rigidly adhering to a milk-only diet. Underlying this regimen was the assumption that "raw milk is a food the body easily turns into good blood," which would restore positive energy when pumped through the body.

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics.

I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.

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

There will be some one at the White House whom you will like more than me," Roosevelt had predicted during his final meeting with the press corps, "but not one who will interest you more.

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.

The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sundering of family ties or love of country.

We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy," he proclaimed, "instead of taking hold of them and governing them with righteousness and justice, in the interests of their own people even more than in the interests of ours.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him - the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.
We are still too near to his greatness,' (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, 'but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.' (748)

The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.

Before any outcome was made public, the radicals had worked themselves into "a fury of rage," certain that the president "was about to give up the political fruits which had been already gathered

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

When he first returned to the Badlands in the summer of 1884, the austere landscape seemed to mirror his melancholy.

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

Roosevelt reasoned, "if the Vice-Presidency led to the Governor Generalship of the Philippines, then the question would be entirely altered." That post was the one he desired above all others, even a second gubernatorial term. From the moment the United States acquired the islands as a provision of the treaty in 1899 ending the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had coveted the job of creating a new government in a Philippines free of Spanish tyranny.

There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.

The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.

During the long sea voyage from Manila to San Francisco, doctors discovered that Taft's incision was not healing properly. It was "opened and drained," but months of bed rest the previous fall had weakened his knees and ankles, making it painful for him to stand for any protracted time. To compound matters, Nellie was suffering from what was later diagnosed as malaria.

Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.

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.

Within the coming decade alone, three signal amendments would be added to the Constitution: the Sixteenth, giving the national government the power to levy a progressive income tax, without which many of the New Deal's social programs might not have been possible; the Seventeenth, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators; and the Nineteenth, finally granting American women the right to vote.

If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation's alienated citizens in the South.

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor