Top 15 Robert A. Caro Quotes

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 necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.

Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.

If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.

President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.

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.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”;

If you do everything, you’ll win,

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.

Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.

...his success in public relations had been due primarily to his masterful utilization of a single public relations technique: identifying himself with a popular cause. This technique was especially advantageous to him because his philosophy — that accomplishment, Getting Things Done, is the only thing that matters, that the end justifies any means, however ruthless — might not be universally popular. By keeping the public eye focused on the cause, the end, the ultimate benefit to be obtained, the technique kept the public eye from focusing on the methods by which the method was to be obtained.

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

We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.

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.

If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses)

When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,