People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry.” George Reedy
The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward
With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.
The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity,
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.
(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
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.
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.
He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;
Sam Rayburn on LBJ’s recuperation from his heart attack: “It would kill him if he relaxed.
The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as “seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.
He took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother and he could read on it.
That speech (Daniel Webster’s) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.
They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.
its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.
While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men— a great reader of men.
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.
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.
He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.
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.