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As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 4
Historian
Journalist
Political Scientist
Brooklyn
New York
Mess
Research
Question
Without
Going
Much
Think
Thinking
More quotes by Doris Kearns Goodwin
There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
(from John Hay's diary) “The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event. So the dimensions of it will be seen differently by different people.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I wish we could go back to the time when the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they directly affected their public responsibilities.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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.
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
I think, as a president, you have to want respect. You can't look for love from the American people. You have to just do what you think is right. Some people will hate you, but others, in the long run, will respect you for what you've done.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
If your ambition comes at the price of an unbalanced life, that there's nothing else that gives you comfort but success, it's not worth it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I really believe that what happens one day affects the next, and I think that came from that experience of learning that if I told the score inning by inning, play by play, it built up to its natural climax.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
