Robert A. Caro

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.

The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,

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

The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward

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

With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins

He not only had the gift of __eading_ 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.

You know,' Russell said, 'we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.' There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role - perhaps the largest role - in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat the remark. 'We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can't Lyndon.

No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South.

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.

Recalling his mother__ endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had __hought that mothers never had to sleep.

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

He could follow someone__ mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.

The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he__ not telling you,_ he said. __he most important thing he has to say is what he__ trying not to say.

its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members __ould be dealt with only in bodies and droves.

While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men_ a great reader of men.

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.

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.