Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Focusing on the qualities that have made some of our leaders exceptional provides a better perspective on our current candidates than what's so often reported — mistaken words, glib replies, fundraising abilities, and TV ads.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
The biographer finds that the past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
The writing of history is a rich process of building on the work of the past with the hope that others will build on what you have done. Through footnotes you point the way to future historians.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
When angry with a colleague, Lincoln liked to write him a "hot letter," giving his emotions free rein. Then he would put the letter aside, knowing he would calm down and never send it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
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.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
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."

Doris Kearns Goodwin
It becomes a competition for memory, these presidents have competed all their lives. Once a President gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history. They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
To lead successfully, you must be willing to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
To be a historian is to discover the facts in context, to discover what things mean, to lay before the reader your reconstruction of time, place, mood, to empathize even when you disagree. You read all the relevant material, you synthesize all the books, you speak to all the people you can, and then you write down what you know about the period. You feel you own it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
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.

Doris Kearns Goodwin