Ron Suskind Quotes

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

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

Trust is something you have to practice. Someday you're going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people's trust.

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

It was easier to be the headstrong monk, a boy on a long-shot mission, before he actually won anything. With the prize in hand, he realized his single-minded drive came across as aloof cockiness; his painful martyrdom certainly looked like self-nomination for sainthood. He's not sure he can keep up this exhausting, aw-shucks façade for much longer.

In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling "his twoness-- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.

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

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