Ron Suskind Quotes

Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence.

Confidence is the public face of competence.

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

It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them.

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

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.

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

[Barack Obama] says at one point, "[Jimmy] Carter, [Bill] Clinton and I suffer from," what he called, "the policy wonk's disease."

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

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

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.

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

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.

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

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 fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.

When you get people standing up saying, 'I'm going to just tell the truth; what do we have to fear?,' it encourages others, and it creates a counterresponse.

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

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

Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent.

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

I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.

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

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.

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

The idea that our son would be like Raymond Babbitt was a shocking reordering of everything. And something we couldn't quite fathom, really.

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises.

Moral action – humble and honest – is the tribute that power must at some point pay to reason.

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

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

A sense of messianic purpose makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president.

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

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

A lawyer's empathy for her client deepens when she realizes that she has only seen the last couple of phases of his decline. How hard it must his initial adjustment have been to his loss of freedom?

Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they'll be fired.

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

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.

Disequilibrium is often instigated by the will to power, a sleepless drive in the human personality to control others, to force them to do what one wants, or not to do what one opposes.

This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.

One world leader warned another "the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need.