RC Tauran

“We want to make the farmer and his wife and family believe and know that they are no longer the forgotten people, but make them know that they are remembered as part of—yea, they are the bulwark of the Government.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“THE PASSION eventually faded from Johnson’s relationship with Alice Glass. She married Charles Marsh, but quickly divorced him, and married several times thereafter. “She never got over Lyndon,” Alice Hopkins says. But the relationship itself survived; even when he was a Senator, Lyndon Johnson would still occasionally dismiss his chauffeur for the day and drive his huge limousine the ninety miles to Longlea; the friendship was ended only by the Vietnam War, which Alice considered one of history’s horrors. By 1967, she referred to Johnson, in a letter she wrote Oltorf, in bitter terms. And later she told friends that she had burned love letters that Johnson had written her—because she didn’t want her granddaughter to know she had ever been associated with the man responsible for Vietnam.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Frederick Law Olmsted had found the same situation—houses at which there was “no other water-closet than the back of a bush or the broad prairies”—on his journey through the Hill Country in 1857. He had been shocked then, because the America he knew had advanced beyond such primitive conditions. Now it was 1937; four more generations had been living in the Hill Country—with no significant advance in the conditions of their life. Many of the people of Lyndon Johnson’s congressional district were still living in the same type of dwelling in which the area’s people had been living in 1857: in rude “dog-run” shelters one board thick, through which the wind howled in the winter. They were still squatting behind a bush to defecate. Because of their poverty, they were still utterly bereft not only of tractors and feed grinders, but of modern medical assistance—and were farming by methods centuries out of date.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power