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 saga...
With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should ta...
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans; Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that...
And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers—there was one about the preacher who at a rur...
When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerou...
The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward
Once Lyndon replied that My doctor says Scotch keeps my arteries open. They don’t have to be that wide open, she said with a smile.
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 reticen...
Was to secure
Dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.
Determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called listening),
When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,
The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to fort...
Nothing he has ever done has been tainted by legality [Robert Moses quoting an anecdote about himself].
In 1918, anti-German hysteria was sweeping Texas. Germans who showed insufficient enthusiasm in purchasing Liberty Bonds were publicly horsewhipped; bands of armed men broke into the homes of German f...
But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered...
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 fe...
Sine qua non
We of the South,