Ron Suskind Quotes

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?

Author describes auto CEO's decisions to drive rather than fly to Washington as "showy penitence".

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.

Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.

The fact is, I can vote for anybody; independents, Republicans, Democrats. But I'm a registered Democrat in the District of Columbia.

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack.

What can we do? It's not dismissive or resigned. He really wants to know.

He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does.

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.

If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again,'

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

Life-shaping institutions tend to start with an idea or revelation. They often become mostly about the preservation and expansion of authority, something they relinquish only with the greatest reluctance.

He is now judging himself, harshly, by his captors' rules.

The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot.

Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.

The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you're asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences.

I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.

You try to hold on to some notions you might have had before, that this will somehow work out, this is a spell that will lift or be broken.

A little known area often defines the fortunes of leaders
management skills.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.

You can actually herd cats. They can't be forced, of course. But if they sense something they want, if there enticed by something good, they'll follow, even in herds.

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

He was rebuilt, reconstituted by vengeance dressed up as high purpose.

If the breadth of perspectives is wide enough to represent the fullest range of views, consensus is unlikely. If consensus is swiftly achieved, it probably means too few voices have been heard.

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin.

An exchange student from Afghanistan "finds himself in the midst of America's circus of self-invention" as he experiences Halloween for the first time. His hosts bauble, "It's the greatest of holidays when you can become anything you want.

I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks.

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

When a precious secret is collected It tends to glow in the darkness. Placed in daylight, fitted along a wide landscape of fact, it often loses its brilliance.

Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world.

These were lobbyists - many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.

A Pakistani exchange student's maternal American host "managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, built on the revolutionary idea that people are the sovereign, the boss, captains of their own fate.
She said, simply, "But what do YOU think?

That's not the part that gnaws at Rolf. It's the last part, where Ezekiel says that if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them ... I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.

It's exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying.

In this era of public survival through continuous storytelling, people want someone who might surprise them.

Rapid change, accommodating it can be one of the great human capacities. But living through it can be the stuff of stress and often suffering.

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice.

It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do.

In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk."

O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in.

"Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, t

Religions find lasting utility in terms of prescription or parameter, rules for the conduct of human affairs.

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.

Hebrews 11:1," says Mr. Taylor. "The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen." "NO. Wrong-you messed it!" Cedric laughs. "It goes: 'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' Man, Mr. Taylor, you always getting 'em wrong." Mr. Taylor howls, "All right, extra point for you," but, as usual, he wrestles the boy back to middle ground, thwarting an outright victory, "The Word, of course, is the Word my young friend. But make it into what's right for you. That's the lesson for today. Take from the Holy Scripture only what you need, nothing more.

He was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and realizations leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities.

I'm more depressed about the realities of the mature bureaucracy and more excited about the ideal that we're fighting for. And the juxtaposition has obvious consequences. Rolf Mowatt-Larrsen

The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.

Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.

Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, "Respect denial." It's a powerful force.

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.

The whole game was about confidence, as it always was. Everything was fine - until it wasn't.

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.

The government of the world's most powerful nation is running furiously in place.

I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me.