I Really Believe That What

What I Think I've Learned Is That You're Never Going To Get It All Right, And You Can't Obsess About Having A Fact Wrong Or A Date Wrong Or Something Like That, As Long As You Tried As Best You Could. If You've Done The Kind Of Research That You're Sure Is Pretty Good, Then You Just Have To Have Confidence In It, So That Nothing Is Perfect In Life. I Think That Is What The Criticism Has Helped Me To Understand.

I Think That's Still What The American Dream Means: That With Perseverance, With Hard Work, You Can Become Something, That The Classes Won't Prevent You From Becoming, That There's A Movement Up That Ladder With Hard Work.

I Think The Most Important Thing I Wanted To Say At Various Times To Franklin And Eleanor Roosevelt Was That It Seemed So Sad To Me That - I Really Believe They Loved Each Other And Had A Great Deal Of Affection - But Because Of That Early Hurt In Their Marriage, There Was A Certain Kind Of Distance From Then On, Until Their Deaths Actually. So At Times, I Just Wanted To Push Them Together And Say, "come On, You Guys! I Know You Love Each Other. This Is Crazy!"

While Its [harvard's] Undergraduate Life Was Still Controlled [in 1908-1912] By A Select Group Of Rich And Fashionable Families Whose Sons Merely Arrived When They Were Due To Fill The Places That Had Been Waiting For Them From The Day They Were Born, It Was, At The Same Time, Opening Its Doors To A More Cosmopolitan Student Population And Beginning To Take The First Tentative Steps Toward Mitigating The Evils Of A Pyramidal Social System That Concentrated All Its Social Honors Upon The Rich And The Wellborn.

The Only Protection As A Historian Is To Institute A Process Of Research And Writing That Minimizes The Possibility Of Error. And That I Have Tried To Do, Aided By Modern Technology, Which Enables Me, Having Long Since Moved Beyond Longhand, To Use A Computer For Both Organizing And Taking Notes.