Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

In fact, Lincoln and Stanton had already heard similar complaints. After dispatching investigators to look into General Grant’s behavior, however, they had concluded that his drinking did not affect his unmatched ability to plan, execute, and win battles. A memorable story circulated that when a delegation brought further rumors of Grant’s drinking to the president, Lincoln declared that if he could find the brand of whiskey Grant used, he would promptly distribute it to the rest of his generals!

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

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.

A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

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.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

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

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.

Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.” Until blacks “stand on level and equal ground,” we cannot rest. It must be our goal “to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.

And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.

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 declared, arguing that “the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.

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

The surest way to be happy,” Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, “is to seek happiness for others.

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.