Quotes from Robert A. Caro

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

During bull sessions at the Dodge, Johnson, echoing one of Miller's pet phrases, would say of Roosevelt: "He's spending us into bankruptcy." The President's first priority, he would repeat emphatically, should be to "balance the budget.

For someone who needs gratitude, the New Deal is the natural philosophy, because it lets you do things for people, and therefore gives you the greatest opportunity to get gratitude.

On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.

When talking with older men, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson "gave them," this aide says, "whatever they wanted to hear.

He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon stood," one student had said. "He was only interested in himself and what could help himself." The feeling in Washington was the same.

Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors.

The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward

The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity

While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men— a great reader of men.

his congressional career almost before it began. Herman

silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it

People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

He could follow someone's mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.

Hamlet: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.

If you can't come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.

President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will";

Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon. Moses used it like a master. Coupled with his overpowering personality, a buffet often did as much for a proposal as a bribe.

Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.

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 to say is what he's trying not to say.

People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry." George Reedy