67 Quotes by Robert A. Caro

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

Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.And now he grabbed for power with both hands. To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during his years of idealism, he had fought só hard.

What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.

their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine,

That speech (Daniel Webster's) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

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

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.

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.