JOSEPH A. CALIFANO JR.

I talked to the rest of the nation for about ten minutes about what Lyndon Johnson was doing for the people of the Northeast. In truth, I thought I was laying it on a bit thickly. But when I returned and spoke with the President, he mentioned several points I could have added. I learned that it was simply not possible to lay it on too thickly for him (or most other politicians).

Johnson showed me how important it was to use every hour of every day to shape national policy while we had the power to do so.

At times we used questionable means to achieve our noble ends.

The dominant color of politics is gray; difficult choices and compromise are required at almost every step of the journey toward a major new program.

Today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally (and vice versa).

Despite an occasional nagging misgiving, I quickly found myself prepared to use the serrated edge of the political knife in the Johnson White House.

I never asked the political affiliation of anyone I hired. I looked for brains, judgment, talent, commitment to our domestic agenda, and a willingness to work around the clock.

LBJ’s policies were giving American blacks hope they’d never had, they found intolerable what they had once accepted as inevitable.

Washington lawyers and politicians have been bedfellows from the moment our nation was conceived.

We believe that the Committee on the Federal Judiciary can no longer be all-white. Minority groups, particularly the black lawyers of our nation, should be represented…

In my years working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, I had learned that those who seek the presidency are prepared to stop at almost nothing to get their party’s nomination.

I’m not your lawyer. But if I were in your shoes, I’d tell the President to burn the tapes immediately and then proclaim he’d done so as a matter of national security and executive privilege and out of an obligation to protect the office of the presidency.

It took a firm hand, sometimes a fist, to imbue a bureaucracy this vast with effective compassion.

With jurisdiction over the issue of abortion and the purity and safety of food, was the only place in America where both motherhood and apple pie were controversial.

I had learned from LBJ that courage is as important as tenacity if you are to get anything done in government.

Title IX is the law of the land. It’s yours to obey and mine to enforce.

In a secular, pluralistic democracy these issues of life and death involve questions about the right of individual Americans to decide and the obligation of the federal government to finance their decisions.

Vice presidents are candidates for political castration.

No legal fee can be too high for a large corporation with billions at stake on a phrase in a law or the timing of a regulation.

It is one thing to be elected President and quite another for a man to become President. Yesterday, you decisively became President of this great nation.

Politicians make pacts; people make peace.

At least 25 percent of the money Americans spend on health care is wasted.

Twenty five years in Washington has taught me never to tell a lie to a reporter.

Probably the most effective legislator we've ever had.

The Surgeon General's job is a bully pulpit and not much else.