Quotes About Power

We broke Batman's back. We killed Superman.

huffed and hefted dumbbells:

display of violence that borders on the transcendent.

When we lose faith in our officers of the law, it harms all of as. It cripples our criminal justice system. It threatens the most vulnerable parts of our community. It allows money and power to subvert justice.

Do steers make treaties with meat packers?

From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson's political life—from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics—his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.

We certainly see how government can work to your detriment today, but people have forgotten what government can do for you. They've forgotten the potential of government, the power of government, to transform people's lives for the better.

Nothing he has ever done has been tainted by legality [Robert Moses quoting an anecdote about himself].

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

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.

dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.

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

He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, would take his penis in his hand, and say: "Well, I've gotta take ol' Jumbo here and give him some exercise. I wonder who I'll fuck tonight.

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.…

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

But, in the fight of his later career, what is most interesting is that when he realized that, because of the handicap of his religion, his brilliance and idealism would not take him to the top in the world of Yale, he made, within Yale, a world of his own, and a world, moreover, in which, in collegiate terms, he had power and influence.

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

In democratic America, supposedly, ultimate power rests in the voters, and the man for whom the majority of them cast their votes is the repository of that power. But Wagner knew better. The spectators may have thought he had a choice in dealing with Moses. He knew that he did not. Why, when Moses pushed the appointment blank across his desk, did the Mayor say not a word? Possibly because there was nothing to say. Power had spoken.

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

Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater.