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.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power

“Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.”
― Robert Caro

“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.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power

“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, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“If you do everything, you’ll win,”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”;”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“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, Master of the Senate

“...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.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power

“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.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power

“People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry." George Reedy”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“If the end doesn't justify the means, what does? (Robert Moses)”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“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, The Passage of Power

“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, Master of the Senate

“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, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.”
― Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent

“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)”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Abraham Lincoln 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.”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.
And now he grabbed for power with both hands.
To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during his years of idealism, he had fought só hard.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“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

“A handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.”
― Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent

“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, Master of the Senate

“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, Master of the Senate

“Are you afraid?” an interviewer asked him after the bombing, and there was a pause, and then Martin Luther King said, very firmly, “No, I’m not. My attitude is that this is a great cause, a great issue that we’re confronted with, and that the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of a cause that I am concerned about, and I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are, and if he is filled with fear, he cannot do it.”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“In the twentieth century, with its eighteen American presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America. He was to be the President who, above all Presidents save Lincoln, codified compassion, the President who wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.”
― Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate

“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, Master of the Senate