Quotes by Robert A. Caro

“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 upo...”

“You know,' Russell said, 'we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.' There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He wa...”

“No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable fu...”

“The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,”

“People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry." George Reedy”

“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 fe...”

“The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward”

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

“He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.”

“The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them as were the job discipline and the subtletie...”

“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.”

“As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups adults who had never, since they left school, had anything p...”

“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.”

“He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;”

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

“The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.”

“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 ne...”

“their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine,”

“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 sa...”

“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...”