Robert A. Caro

Quotes

• “The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechani...”
• “As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; the...”
• “Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audien...”
• “But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a ma...”
• “He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himsel...”
• “Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, tha...”
• “You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a...”
• “Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral,...”
• “Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, o...”
• “A newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town's true leaders – which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was lis...”
• “Recalling his mother’s endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he ...”
• “On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricit...”
• “(LBJ) had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”— made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cade...”
• “if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition,...”
• “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has ...”
• “While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men— a great...”
• “He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his ...”
• “its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and...”
• “That speech (Daniel Webster's) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American h...”
• “He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.”
• “The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward”
• “He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.”
• “They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.”
• “People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry." George Reedy”
• “He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.”
• “The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,”
• “their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine,”