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.

— 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.

— Robert A. Caro

But although the cliché 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

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.

— Robert A. Caro

He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

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

— Robert A. Caro

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

He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother, and he could read on it.

— Robert A. Caro

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