Quotes from Robert A. Caro

The belief that "a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being" is a popular delusion. "Politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend on it," but "a true keynote speech would reveal the political government handling certain administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.

After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe's room and said, "I agree with everything you said." Perhaps he did agree—intellectually. But he didn't take the advice. He couldn't. He was beyond listening to warnings, as was demonstrated the next day, when the convention opened.

Emerging from the caucus, Johnson told reporters that he had no plans to release his delegates; "My name will stay as long as the American people are interested.

The common problem, yours and mine, everyone's/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be—but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.

We have to do something about this hate, and you have to get to the root of hate. The roots are poverty and disease and illiteracy.

Pragmatism had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified—into a morality that is amorality.

The newspaper columnist James Reston wrote that "President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act.

strength with which President Kennedy dispatched his enemies"—a tribute couched in rather remarkable words: Johnson described Kennedy "when he looks you straight in the eye and puts that knife into you without flinching.

The city governments of the United States are the worst in Christiandom - the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.

Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. "He said, 'Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in my ribs.' He laughed, and Russell said, 'Finnegan is a pro,' and that was it.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"; "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty"—the phrases of Kennedy's inaugural

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country" that they summoned up, and, in some ways, summed up, the best of the American spirit, igniting hopes so that, almost on the instant it seemed, they summoned up a new era for Americans, an era of ideals, of brightness, of hope.

The belief that "a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being" is a popular delusion.

that quality in me. And I know it wasn't only logic that made me think: I'm never going to write about a crucial election, a pivotal moment in my subject's life, and say that no one's ever going to know if it was really stolen or not until I've done everything I can think of to find out if it was stolen or not.

A surprising number of representatives," the Saturday Evening Post reported, "knew his hat and coat, when it hangs on its accustomed peg in the House restaurant"—a discreet reference to the fact that many Congressmen checked to see that he was present before they entered the restaurant, lest they be forced to pay for their meals themselves.

The record was one of economy in government, of prudence and frugality, of spending the people's money as carefully as if it had been his own, of having government do only what the people couldn't do for themselves. That last point was very important

The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf. And

You're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers

The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.

The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence.

As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.

That speech (Daniel Webster's) "raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.

Miller just hated Roosevelt," Jones says, "and Lyndon was in tune with Miller. Hell, sometimes he was louder against Roosevelt than Miller was.

I'VE BEEN ENCOUNTERING questions of race, of segregation—of America's great crime—all my professional life.