Robert A. Caro Quotes
Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: "It would kill him if he relaxed.
He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.
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.
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.
its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.
That speech (Daniel Webster's) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.
He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.
The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.
People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry." George Reedy
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.
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.
(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
He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.
With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward