Top 80 Robert A. Caro Quotes
#1. 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
Robert A. Caro
#2. To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he "thought" he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, "What the fuck good is thinking to me? Thinking isn't good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to know!" Often, he didn't know.
Robert A. Caro
#3. A laconic Texas lawmaker declined to use his considerable influence to intervene in a loud dispute between his colleagues. When asked why not, he said, They're not voting. If they're not voting, they're not passing any laws. If they're not passing any laws, they're not hurting anybody.
Robert A. Caro
#4. He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;
Robert A. Caro
#5. When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him. - WOODROW WILSON
Robert A. Caro
#6. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#7. (LBJ) had what a journalist calls "a genius for analogy" - made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate
Robert A. Caro
#8. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#9. Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;
Robert A. Caro
#10. I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.
Robert A. Caro
#11. Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position.
Robert A. Caro
#12. Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied.
Robert A. Caro
#13. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#14. Once Lyndon replied that "My doctor says Scotch keeps my arteries open." "They don't have to be that wide open," she said with a smile.
Robert A. Caro
#15. The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward
Robert A. Caro
#16. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#17. That speech (Daniel Webster's) raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.
Robert A. Caro
#18. Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.
Robert A. Caro
#19. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#20. He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.
Robert A. Caro
#21. They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.
Robert A. Caro
#22. MR. CALHOUN. Never, never. MR. WEBSTER. What he means he is very apt to say. MR. CALHOUN. Always, always. MR. WEBSTER. And I honor him for it.
Robert A. Caro
#23. The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.
Robert A. Caro
#24. Its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.
Robert A. Caro
#25. Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors.
Robert A. Caro
#26. The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,
Robert A. Caro
#27. And, in fact, had Johnson's plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been "just the way it was.
Robert A. Caro
#28. Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.
Robert A. Caro
#29. Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.
Robert A. Caro
#31. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will";
Robert A. Caro
#32. Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.
Robert A. Caro
#33. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#35. Luther King gave people "the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be," Bayard Rustin said - in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield.
Robert A. Caro
#36. He not only had the gift of "reading" men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too.
Robert A. Caro
#37. Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,
Robert A. Caro
#38. With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
Robert A. Caro
#39. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#40. He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.
Robert A. Caro
#41. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#42. President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act.
Robert A. Caro
#43. Determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called "listening"),
Robert A. Caro
#44. I begrudge making a career out of clothes, but Lyndon likes bright colors and dramatic styles that do the most for one's figure, and I try to please him," she was to say. "I've really tried to learn the art of clothes, because you don't sell for what you're worth unless you look well.
Robert A. Caro
#45. I always tell the truth, so I don't need a good memory to remember what I said") - in
Robert A. Caro
#46. If one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
Robert A. Caro
#47. When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that You don't have to explain something you haven't said,
Robert A. Caro
#48. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#49. Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.
Robert A. Caro
#51. The city governments of the United States are the worst in Christiandom - the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.
Robert A. Caro
#52. He could follow someone's mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.
Robert A. Caro
#54. He (LBJ) played on their fears as he played on their hopes.
Robert A. Caro
#55. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#56. He repeated his plea that they be fair and open-minded, open to reason and compromise, and praised them for being so reasonable and open-minded thus far - which of course made it harder for them to act otherwise,
Robert A. Caro
#57. Richard Russell adored his wife. After they had been married for almost forty years, he sent her a note saying, With a sense of love and gratitude that is overpowering, I can only say God bless you, idol of my heart.
Robert A. Caro
#58. Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking,
Robert A. Caro
#59. Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience - a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.
Robert A. Caro
#60. Dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.
Robert A. Caro
#61. Lyndon Johnson's sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.
Robert A. Caro
#62. People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry. George Reedy
Robert A. Caro
#63. Recalling his mother's endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had thought that mothers never had to sleep.
Robert A. Caro
#64. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.
Robert A. Caro
#65. 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 ... where race, religion, language and color didn't count against you.
Robert A. Caro
#66. 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.'
Robert A. Caro
#67. A handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.
Robert A. Caro
#68. ONCE HE KNEW HOW to do things in Washington, he started doing them - with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from something dreadful.
Robert A. Caro
#69. 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
Robert A. Caro
#70. And he worked himself, worked himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.
Robert A. Caro
#71. Russell answered, Well, no - well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work ... but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.
Robert A. Caro
#72. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#73. You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)
Robert A. Caro
#74. Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: It would kill him if he relaxed.
Robert A. Caro
#75. Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman's Fair Deal.
Robert A. Caro
#76. 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.
Robert A. Caro
#78. If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses)
Robert A. Caro
#79. Johnson told the doctors that "he enjoyed nothing but whiskey, sunshine and sex." Reedy found the moment "poignant," he was to recall. "Without realizing what he was doing, he had outlined succinctly the tragedy of his life. The only way he could get away from himself was sensation: sun, booze, sex.
Robert A. Caro
#80. 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.
Robert A. Caro
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