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

— Robert A. Caro

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.

— Robert A. Caro

(LBJ) had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”— made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate

— Robert A. Caro

Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.

— Robert A. Caro

Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.

— Robert A. Caro

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.

— Robert A. Caro

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

On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro