An Unfinished Love Story Quotes

“Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in the isolated villages and city slums of dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that human history is thus shaped.
(Page 281)”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“We had lived surrounded by books all our married lives. They were our element. We had written them, read for pleasure, amassed mini libraries for particular projects, collected them, organized them into ever shifting categories, and in the end, dwelled inside what we joyfully called our house of books.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“One thing that a look backward over the vicissitudes of our country’s story suggests is that massive and sweeping change will come. And it can come swiftly. Whether or not it is healing and inclusive change depends on us. As ever, such change will generally percolate from the ground up, as in the days of the American Revolution, the antislavery movement, the progressive movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement. From the long view of my life, I see how history turns and veers. The end of our country has loomed many times before. America is not as fragile as it seems.
(Page 9)”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“Aeschylus. He wrote: In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“We’re going to get a law,” he pledged, “that says every boy and girl in this country, no matter how poor, or the color of their skin, or the region they come from, is going to be able to get all the education they can take.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“personage was formally identified upon entrance: Acclaimed eighty-seven-year-old poet Robert Frost; father of antibiotics Selman Waksman; literature Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck; astronaut John Glenn; immunologist Thomas Weller, whose virus research enabled the polio vaccine; J. Robert Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project director; celebrated novelists James Baldwin and William Styron—in all, a parade of 127 guests and their spouses.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“All of a sudden, he said, ‘You know, there’s something to your game. Republicans are always calling for a return to normalcy, contentment, the status quo. And we’re always pushing forward with our square deals and new deals and fair Americas.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“Sixty years after the memories of the changes and upheavals of the Sixties have begun to fade, been half-forgotten or become misunderstood, my project with Dick might add our voices … to the task of restoring a “living history” of that decade, allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made, what chances were lost, and what light might be cast on our own fractured time. Too often, memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.
(Pages 404-405)”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“Though total agreement between the Executive and Congress is impossible, total respect is important. I am proud to be among my colleagues of the Congress whose legacy to their trust is their loyalty to their nation. I am not unaware of inner emotions of the new Members of this body tonight. Twenty-eight years ago I felt as you do now. You will soon learn that you are among men whose first love is their country, men who try each day to do, as best they can, what they believe is right. “What an”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual,” remarked Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, “but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“The dialogue this morning was Cicero's comparison of various types of friends: useful friends with whom we have transactional relations, amusing friends with whom we share pleasure and games, and those rare friends that Cicero calls "another self" with whom we share soul secrets and deepest feelings. p289”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“In the long run, the aspirations and inspiration that Kennedy had brought to Ashland may well have proven every bit as vital to leadership as policies and programs. It was a point, I came to understand, that I had never properly realized or conceded to Dick. APRIL”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“It was true that after eighty, he had begun to suffer the typical infirmities of old age: He needed more sleep, a pacemaker regulated his heartbeat, his balance was compromised”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“He never reached Dick’s favorite line, “If the President does not himself wage the struggle for equal rights—if he stands above the battle—then the battle will be inevitably lost.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“How could I have been so stupid? I know better than to listen to experts. They always have their own agenda. All my life I’ve known it, and yet I still barreled ahead.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“For the first time in history, we had a chance to construct a society more concerned with the quality of our goals than the quantity of our goods.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“The Great Society would be built on the belief that America’s affluence must work for all its citizens.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“In reply, Johnson said, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“The New York Times’s Tom Wicker deemed Johnson’s speech “remarkable in the history of the presidency, as well as of the Civil Rights Movement.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“Dick always found a bedrock wisdom in the warning of Eugene O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that, but life won’t let us.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“is not what I promise I will do; it is what I ask you to join me in doing.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance….”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s