sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster, - Robert A. Caro

for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns — from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues — about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself — or to anyone else — could stand before it.

Everything you’ve been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you’re in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power. And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.

He told them a story — “the little baby in the cradle,” as a student would call it. “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be President of the United States.