67 Quotes by Robert A. Caro

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 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

He (LBJ) played on their fears as he played on their hopes.

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 subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.

(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

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 productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.

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.