Ron Suskind Quotes

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

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.

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

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

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.

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.