Quotes by Ron Suskind

You can actually herd cats. They cant be forced, of course. But if they sense something they want, if there enticed by something good, theyll follow, even in herds.

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

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.

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.

Im more depressed about the realities of the mature bureaucracy and more excited about the ideal that were fighting for. And the juxtaposition has obvious consequences. Rolf Mowatt-Larrsen

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

A lawyers 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 theyll be fired.

The whole game was about confidence, as it always was. Everything was fine—until it wasnt.

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

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.

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

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.

Nonetheless, the fact remains; he had hope in a better world he could not yet see that overwhelmed the cries of you cant or you wont or why bother. More than anything else, mastering that faith, on cue, is what separated him from his peers, and distinguishes him from so many people in these literal, sophisticated times. It has made all the difference.

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.

Islam is in a formative period struggling to consolidate the vast reach won by both inspiration and force at its founding. Two centuries along, the faith of Muhammad hangs like an intricate veil: a religion still searching for institutional wholeness, a set of lessons to live by.

A Pakistani exchange students 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?

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