Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.

On the return trip, they passed a brigade of black soldiers, who rushed forward to greet the president, “screaming, yelling, shouting: ‘Hurrah for the Liberator; Hurrah for the President.’ ” Their “spontaneous outburst” moved Lincoln to tears, “and his voice was so broken by emotion” that he could hardly reply.

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.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.” Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection.

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;

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.

"It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government, "he observed, "that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment... That men are capable of self-government."

I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.

the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.

Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.

My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.

I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys, I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below — Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of sports.