Top 100 Robert Caro Quotes
#1. Lyndon Johnson (with Abraham Lincoln close behind). Johnson was able to get things done, to read other people, and to adjust his own approach accordingly. One of the reasons he has so fascinated biographer Robert Caro over the years is Johnson's consummate skill in acquiring and using influence.
Jeffrey Pfeffer
#2. I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.
David Edelstein
#3. I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.
David Remnick
#4. Long Island is shaped the way it is largely because of Robert Moses. Long Island is a perfect example of how political power shapes people's lives every day.
Robert Caro
#6. If it's coming near the end of a chapter and I'm really getting into it, I tend to get up earlier and earlier, just because I'm excited to get to work.
Robert Caro
#7. In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.
Robert Caro
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.
Robert Caro
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader of his party.
Robert Caro
#15. Among the reasons that you go into journalism, I suppose, are some rather idealistic, even foolish reasons. In my case one of the reasons was I wanted to explain how things really work, how political power really works.
Robert Caro
#16. I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
Robert Caro
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. (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
#20. 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
#21. Most Sundays, with the exception of football Sundays, I work, because I don't take days off as long as I'm working on something that's supposed to be all in the same mood.
Robert Caro
#22. Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
Robert Caro
#23. I finish what I have to do in the office.
Robert Caro
#25. Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;
Robert A. Caro
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I think President Obama has done more than he is given credit for.
Robert Caro
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward
Robert A. Caro
#33. 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
#34. Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.
Robert Caro
#35. To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.
Robert Caro
#36. That speech (Daniel Webster's) raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.
Robert A. Caro
#37. 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
#38. I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.
Robert Caro
#39. 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
#40. Someday a political genius will come along and make the Senate work.
Robert Caro
#41. He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.
Robert A. Caro
#42. They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.
Robert A. Caro
#43. 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
#44. The right of a minority is so important in a democracy.
Robert Caro
#45. There's a theory, and I think the theory is right, that in order to make a change you've got to make the whole language of the page harmonious. Well, that's a lot easier with a computer.
Robert Caro
#46. The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.
Robert A. Caro
#47. 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
#48. Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors.
Robert A. Caro
#49. I like new ballets because they're totally new. As you get older, new experiences are harder and harder to come by, so it's pretty great to have a new experience.
Robert Caro
#50. You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world.
Robert Caro
#51. Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. His relationships with politicians were measured by that criterion.
Robert Caro
#52. The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,
Robert A. Caro
#53. And, in fact, had Johnson's plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been "just the way it was.
Robert A. Caro
#54. Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.
Robert A. Caro
#55. Whenever I go to work I wear a jacket and a tie, because I'm inherently quite lazy, and my books take so long to do, and my publishers don't bug me, so it's so easy to fool yourself into thinking you're working harder than you really are.
Robert Caro
#56. The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations.
Robert Caro
#57. Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.
Robert A. Caro
#59. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will";
Robert A. Caro
#60. Senator Harding, who declared in his inaugural address that We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world.
Robert A. Caro
#61. 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
#62. The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.
Robert Caro
#64. 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
#65. I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Robert Caro
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.
Robert Caro
#69. With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
Robert A. Caro
#70. 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
#71. I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
Robert Caro
#72. He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.
Robert A. Caro
#73. 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
#74. Sometimes during a ballet I'll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage.
Robert Caro
#75. President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act.
Robert A. Caro
#76. 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.
Robert Caro
#77. What would be the good of rushing? You want these books to last.
Robert Caro
#78. There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.
Robert Caro
#79. Determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called "listening"),
Robert A. Caro
#80. 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
#81. I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.
Robert Caro
#82. I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don't know why.
Robert Caro
#83. I always tell the truth, so I don't need a good memory to remember what I said") - in
Robert A. Caro
#84. 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
#85. If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.
Robert Caro
#86. When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that You don't have to explain something you haven't said,
Robert A. Caro
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. Everything seems to be going faster and faster. It's really harder to create something that endures. The New York City Ballet has succeeded in doing that.
Robert Caro
#91. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.
Robert Caro
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. He (LBJ) played on their fears as he played on their hopes.
Robert A. Caro
#96. At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.
Robert Caro
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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