John Katzenbach Quotes

Young men make mistakes. This is inevitable, in any profession.

The neurotic rich, as one doctor he knew used to term his clientele. The worried well.

Revenge serves to cleanse the heart and soul. It has been around since the first caveman climbed down out of a tree and bashed his brother over the head for some slight of honor.

All the time thinking he'd had no idea before this night how easy it was in this world to be hated.

Fun is only real and sustainable if it feeds off the team's purpose and performance aspirations.

Tommy was persuaded that the murder charge was buttressed by that antagonism, which, from the prosecution's viewpoint, was probably ninety percent of their case. The bloodstains, being absent from the bunk room on the night of the murder, the discovery of the knife - all these things when taken together painted a compelling portrait. It was only upon examining each separately that the supposition unraveled somewhat.

What I was, isn't what I am. And what I am, isn't yet what I can be.

Anonymity, he thought, is seductive.

It was a difficult day. Disorienting. What is it they say? Death, divorce, and moving are the three most stressful events for your heart. And your psyche, too, I'll wager.

Once, he reminded himself, I studied hard to learn to save lives. Now I must educate myself in how to take one.

Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia.

Energy in the morning, determination at midday, hunger in the evening.

One of the things I learned in my maddest years was that one could be in a room, with walls and barred windows and locks on the doors, surrounded by other crazy people, or even stuffed into an isolation cell all alone, but that really wasn't the room one was in at all. The real room that one occupied was constructed by memory, by relationships, by events, by all sorts of unseen forces. Sometimes delusions. Sometimes hallucinations. Sometimes desires. Sometimes dreams and hopes, or ambitions. Sometimes anger. That was what was important: to always recognize where the real walls were. (176)

A nightmare is something you awaken from, Peter," she had said. "But thoughts and ideas that remain after its terrors have disappeared are something considerably worse.

Belief is an odd thing for a defense counsel, Tommy. It is not necessary to believe in your client to defend him. Some would say that it is easier to not truly have an opinion, that the maneuverings of the law are only clouded by the emotions of trust and honesty. But

A demanding performance challenge tends to create a Team. In any situation requiring a combination of multiple skills, experiences and judgments, a team inevitably gets better results than a collection of individuals. Teams provide the kind of responsiveness, speed, on-line customization and quality that is beyond the reach of individual performance.

The best game to play, he thought, is the game you don't realize you are playing.

That truth is far stronger than death.

Dreams were important, unconscious riddles that mirrored the heart.

The same dynamics that promote performance also support learning and behavioral change.

If you see one dead body, it's awful and compelling and hard to tear one's eyes away. If you see a hundred they start to mean nothing.

It is, he thought, the greatest luxury of our existence, no matter how miserable, that we don't know our allotted span of days.

I can no longer hear my voices, so I am a little lost. My suspicion is they would know far better how to tell this story. At least they would have opinions and suggestions and definite ideas as to what should go first and what should go last and what should go in the middle. They would inform me when to add detail, when to omit extraneous information, what was important and what was trivial. After so much time slipping past, I am not particularly good at remembering these things myself and could certainly use their help. A great many events took place, and it is hard for me to know precisely where to put what. And sometimes I'm unsure that incidents I clearly remember actually did happen. A memory that seems one instant to be as solid as stone, the next seems as vaporous as a mist above the river. That's one of the major problems with being crazy: you're just naturally uncertain about things. (9)