Quotes About Leadership

Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: It would kill him if he relaxed.

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; "That's where I'm needed," he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. "I just happened to be there," he was to say. "There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.

One of the wise, practical people around the table" urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn't waste his power on lost causes—no matter how worthy the cause might be. "The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn't to expend it on this," he said. "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" Lyndon Johnson replied.

IS WHERE POWER GOES": the most significant factor in any equation that adds up to political power, Lyndon Johnson had assured his allies, is the individual, not the office; for a man with a gift for acquiring power, whatever office he held would become powerful—because of what he would make out of it. Johnson

The second most powerful man in the country." All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking "nothing jobs" and making them into something—something big. And now, no sooner

It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

and he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. "He used to say, 'I want only can do people.' That was one of his favorite expressions. 'I only want can do people around. I don't want anybody who tells me that they can't do something.' 

Quite obviously, since every practical politician knows that hate and fear offer more forceful tools for organizing than love and respect, Lyndon had a rather fertile field at San Marcos.…

A newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town's true leaders – which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was listened to other farmers – only through endless hours of subtle probing of reticent men.

its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members "could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.

Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that "We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.

Robert A. Caro

That campaign raises, in fact, one of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson; the relationship between means and ends. Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson's life, civil rights, in particular, perhaps, but others too, were noble. Heroic advances in the cause of social justice....Those noble ends would not have been possible without the means, far from noble, that brought Johnson to power...To what extent are ends inseparable from means?

With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins

I swore then and there," Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it." It was at Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was to say, "that my dream began of an America Ã¢â'¬Â¦ where race, religion, language and color didn't count against you.

Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater.

Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.

And, in fact, had Johnson's plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been "just the way it was.

Robert A. Caro

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.

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