The Path to Power
Robert A. Caro
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,”
“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.”
“for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.”
“Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; “a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,”
“In every election in which he ran—not only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.”
“BUT WHAT, really, had the People’s Party—the farmers who called themselves “Alliancemen”—asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion? They”
“A candidate who, night after night, tries “to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse.… It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion.”
“Quite obviously, since every practical politician knows that hate and fear offer more forceful tools for organizing than love and respect, Lyndon had a rather fertile field at San Marcos.…”
“Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion?”
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