Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

We are now parents. The love for our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. Edwin Stanton to his wife.

In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.

Discipline and keen insight had once again served Lincoln most effectively. By regulating his emotions and resisting the impulse to strike back at Chase when the circular first became known, he gained time for his friends to mobilize the massive latent support for his candidacy. Chase’s aspirations were crushed without Lincoln’s direct intrusion. He had known all along that his treasury secretary was no innocent, but by seeming to accept Chase’s word, he allowed the secretary to retain some measure of his dignity while the country retained his services in the cabinet. Lincoln himself would determine the appropriate time for Chase’s departure.

Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare’s kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.

Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” Henry Demarest Lloyd

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.

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

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party — including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.

Lincoln was “the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.

Don’t hit till you have to; but, when you do hit, hit hard.

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.

"Tolstoy went on to observe,"This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
"Washington was a typical American. Naopoleon was a typical Frenchmen, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — - bigger than all the Presidents t,ogether. We are still too near to his greatness, " Tolstoy concluded, "but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when it's light beams directly on us."

Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life — a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.

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