We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't beli… - Robert A. Caro

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.

Democracy does not merely mean periodic elections. It means a government held accountable to the people between elections.

ONCE HE KNEW HOW to do things in Washington, he started doing them — with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from something dreadful.

People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times — particularly the force that is political power.