Ron Suskind Quotes

#1. The United States, the President said, "must be a force for good." Americans focused on "good." Much of the world focused on "force," on being handled.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#4. 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,'

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#6. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#8. 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.

Ron Suskind

#9. I'm a partisan, too. I'm in favor of AUTHENTICITY. US State Department veteran and U.N. refugee official Wendy Chamberlain

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#11. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#13. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#16. 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.

Ron Suskind

#17. By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#23. Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

Ron Suskind

#24. The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

Ron Suskind

#25. 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.

Ron Suskind

#26. Security is by far the city's predominant business.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#28. We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ron Suskind

#29. 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.

Ron Suskind

#30. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#34. 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.

Ron Suskind

#35. 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.

Ron Suskind

#36. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating new realities ... we're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Ron Suskind

#37. Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

Ron Suskind

#38. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#40. 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?

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#43. 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?

Ron Suskind

#44. 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.

Ron Suskind

#45. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#48. 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.

Ron Suskind

#49. If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two,

Ron Suskind

#50. You are livin'," she says in feigned exasperation. "You just don't see what I see. You got something special. Something you got from your ma. It's a thing. I mean, I wish I had it. It's this thing where you know what it's going to take, and then you get it done. You push yourself and you get there.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#53. To try to be authentic these days, to ask questions of the people in power - it's difficult. This administration has evolved new techniques to handle people like me. Their strategy, in a word, is simple: ignore them.

Ron Suskind

#54. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#56. Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#58. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#60. 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.

Ron Suskind

#61. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#63. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#70. 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

Ron Suskind

#71. 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.

Ron Suskind

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

Ron Suskind

#73. 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.

Ron Suskind