Fred Kaplan Quotes

Reading Edmund Morris's 'Colonel Roosevelt' is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.'

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term.

Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.

If America wants to retain its position as a global power, its president must listen to the people and show strong leadership at this turning point in human history.

President Roosevelt's leadership put the world on notice that the United States of America - with the freest, most dynamic economy the world had ever seen - was open for business.

I'm a big fan of Michael Morpurgo.

Browsing the first editions at my local independent bookstore, I came across 'Pastoralia,' a collection of stories by George Saunders. I'd read one of the stories in it already, and several other Saunders stories in magazines and anthologies, and liked them all.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

B is for bestseller.

I love history, and Churchill is one of my favorite people to study. He's a fascinating, fascinating man.

If Roosevelt were alive today, he'd turn over in his grave.

In our day, major-generals and governors, and even presidential candidates, have taken to the writing of history, and the historical scholar has the opportunity of reviewing them.

Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps one of the most colorful personalities in our history and will always be, I think, an influence on the youth of the country. His spirit was ever youthful and he lived his philosophy with all his might, never grudging in his praise of others, thereby bringing out in them the desire to meet his standards of integrity and duty.

With some of Mr. Roosevelt's political acts I could never possibly agree. But I knew him solely in his capacity as leader of a nation at war -- and in that capacity he seemed to me to fulfill all that could possibly be expected of him.

If Roosevelt took this country into war and won, he might be one of the great figures of all time. But if we lost, he would be damned forever. The cards are now stacked against us.

President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt always had a wider point of view, of necessity, than I did.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

One of the finest statesmen of the present time is also a first-class scout, and that is Mr. Roosevelt, the late President of the United States of America.

Words about Lincoln fill a small but ever-growing library.

I'm not a Lincoln expert, rather a biographer who has had the pleasure of reading much of what has been written about him from his lifetime to this year of his bicentennial. Some advice: Don't try that unless you have at least five years available.

One of my favorite authors is Michael Ondaatje.

A supreme pragmatist, Kissinger was never interested in the art of the impossible - and nor, as a biographer, am I. That is why, having initially been invited to write his entire official biography, I eventually decided to devote myself to writing just one year in his life: 1973.

The point about Roosevelt's New Deal was that it was visionary - for the 1930s.