Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period... I like to learn from the past... not 'live' in it.

The past has infinite value if one learns from it.

I don't want to be 25 again.

John was the smartest and most amazing comedian I've ever worked with. I think more than teaching me about acting or comedy, he taught me about life and the love of people and respect of people.

When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.

Father's Day each year makes me grateful for what my father did for me. This has little to do with our relationship, and much to do with what he taught me.

I seriously feel like the best days are ahead, and I like the idea of getting to do everything I did before but with more knowledge, experience, and street smarts. There's a certain love, appreciation, and gratitude that you have at 40 that you don't have when you're younger, and it makes every accomplishment feel so much better.

Love them for who they are, and what they are they are; they are not you. Good stuff, isn't it? You have to live 73 years to get that.

I love stories, and as I got older, I realized how important what happened yesterday is to how you try to make your present better.

It is not well to go into things long past, unless to learn something for our present guidance.

The past becomes the armor with which we face the future.

You cannot alter the past. You can only learn from it, and … history is the best teacher.

I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place.

One of the great things about being an older person is that I am very aware of the scope of the work and the historical sense of it. It's bigger than me.

It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future.

I can't change history but only learn from it.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

I could never say that I regret being given the gift of experience and love.

We cannot change the past, only recover from it. And perhaps learn its cruel lessons.

From time to time, there are moments when I feel that even the smallest experiences from the past can be applied to something greater in the future.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.

Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.