The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Robert A. Caro

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

acculturation, culture, culture-shock, education, job-training

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.

bitterness, education, opportunity, poverty

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.

parenthood, servant-leadership

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

city-planning, new-york-city

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.

listening, negotiation

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

leadership, listening, negotiation

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.

influence, leadership, relationships, retail-politics

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.

influence, leadership

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.

influence, leadership, others-focus

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

influence, leadership, peer-pressure

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

media, persuasion, rhetoric

That speech (Daniel Webster’s) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.

loyalty, patriotism