Top 35 Robert A. Caro Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Robert A. Caro

2. “Science, knowledge, logic and brilliance might be useful tools but they didn’t build highways or civil service systems. Power built highways and civil service systems. Power was what dreams needed, not power in the hand of the dreamer himself necessarily but power put behind the dreamer’s dream by the man who it to put there, power that he termed “executive support”.”

— Robert A. Caro

3. “What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there.”

— Robert A. Caro

4. “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.”

— Robert A. Caro

5. “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

6. “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 upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history’s eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

— Robert A. Caro

7. “Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.”

— Robert A. Caro

8. “But when I began researching Robert Moses’ expressway-building, and kept reading, in textbook after textbook, some version of the phrase “the human cost of highways” with never a detailed examination of what the “human cost” truly consisted of or of how it stacked up against the benefits of highways, I found myself simply unable to go forward to the next chapter. I felt I just had to try to show – to make readers not only see but understand and feel – what “human cost” meant.”

— Robert A. Caro

9. “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

10. “In every election in which he ran – not only in college, but thereafter – he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.”

— Robert A. Caro

11. “A newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town’s true leaders – which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was listened to other farmers – only through endless hours of subtle probing of reticent men.”

— Robert A. Caro

12. “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “And he worked himself, worked himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.”

— Robert A. Caro

20. “Of this there was virtually no public awareness, and Lyndon Johnson left the Presidency, and lived out his life, and died, with the American people still ignorant not only of the dimensions of his greed but of its intensity.”

— Robert A. Caro

21. “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

22. “I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times – particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy.”

— Robert A. Caro

23. “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 sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.”

— Robert A. Caro

24. “A handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.”

— Robert A. Caro

25. “One of the wise, practical people around the table” urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on lost causes – no matter how worthy the cause might be. “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” he said. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johnson replied.”

— Robert A. Caro

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack’s death. “When did he come out of that?” she repeated, and then said, “I don’t think he ever came out of that.”

— Robert A. Caro

29. “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

30. “We certainly see how government can work to your detriment today, but people have forgotten what government can do for you. They’ve forgotten the potential of government, the power of government, to transform people’s lives for the better.”

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

32. “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.”

— Robert A. Caro

33. “Said New York Post columnist William V. Shannon: “There is a growing tendency on the part of Americans to ‘consume’ political figures in much the same sense we consume entertainment personalities on television and in the movies.”

— Robert A. Caro

34. “That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today;.”

— Robert A. Caro

35. “Johnson’s customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that at college he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward.” All during World War II he had done everything he could to avoid combat.”

— Robert A. Caro

36. “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

37. “But, in the fight of his later career, what is most interesting is that when he realized that, because of the handicap of his religion, his brilliance and idealism would not take him to the top in the world of Yale, he made, within Yale, a world of his own, and a world, moreover, in which, in collegiate terms, he had power and influence.”

— Robert A. Caro

38. “In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.”

— Robert A. Caro

39. “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