Quotes About Ambition

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

In every election in which he ran—not only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.

Power corrupts—that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliché. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, he must conceal those traits that might make others reluctant to give it to him, that might even make them refuse to give it to him. Once the man has power, it is no longer necessary for him to hide those traits. In

This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson's political life—as

Robert A. Caro

Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

twenty-three-old

Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater.

He might love to read, but he was certainly no greasy grind.

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

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

his congressional career almost before it began. Herman

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.

Take big bites. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

Cast me into a dungeon;, burn me at the state, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives -- but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge . . . and stronger.

How is a sincere criminal, trying hard, going to get ahead in his profession if his victim fails to cooperate?

Ben, why should anybody want that much power? Why does a moth fly toward light?

To die trying is the proudest humans thing.

Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of single-minded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests.

Captain, that's not your style; you don't want to make money, you simply want to have money—in order to spend it.

To support his austerely upholstered nest and its rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return simply because it was easier to be rich than to be poor—Harshaw merely wished to live exactly as he liked, doing whatever he thought was best for him.

Wealth—great wealth—is a curse . . . unless you are devoted to the money-making game for its own sake. And even then it has serious drawbacks.