Top 100 Suskind Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. God gives good times and bad times, but He does not wish us to bemoan and bewail the bad times, but to prove ourselves men.
Patrick Suskind
#4. And he wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.
Patrick Suskind
#5. The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.
Ron Suskind
#6. And because people are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes, they will say it is because this is a girl with beauty and grace and charm.
Patrick Suskind
#7. These were lobbyists - many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.
Ron Suskind
#8. 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
#9. And now fear spread over the countryside. People no longer knew against whom
to direct their impotent rage.
Patrick Suskind
#10. It was good, really, that this external world still existed, if only as a place of refuge.
Patrick Suskind
#11. One world leader warned another the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need.
Ron Suskind
#12. 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
#13. Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.
Ron Suskind
#14. 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
#15. He was not bound. No one led him by the arm. He got out of the carriage as if he were a free man.
Patrick Suskind
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. He no longer yearned for his life in the cave. He had experienced that life once and it had proved unlivable. Just as had his other experience - life among human beings. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all.
Patrick Suskind
#19. Grenouille's mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility of sensate impressions.
Patrick Suskind
#20. Not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame.
Patrick Suskind
#21. In this era of public survival through continuous storytelling, people want someone who might surprise them.
Ron Suskind
#22. Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence.
Ron Suskind
#23. The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises.
Ron Suskind
#24. He was finally able to bask in his own existence; and he found it splendid.
Patrick Suskind
#25. No human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitomy of chaos and anarchy, a pigeon that whizzes around unpredictably, that sets it's claws in you, picks at your eyes..
Patrick Suskind
#26. This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.
Ron Suskind
#27. He is now judging himself, harshly, by his captors' rules.
Ron Suskind
#28. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning.
Patrick Suskind
#29. But he did decide vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be.
Patrick Suskind
#30. Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.
Ron Suskind
#31. He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!
Patrick Suskind
#32. Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.
Ron Suskind
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. She was indeed a girl of exquisite beauty. She was one of those languid women made of dark honey smooth and sweet and terribly sticky.
Patrick Suskind
#36. He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourslef to crush in your own hand disgusts you.
Patrick Suskind
#37. Ignorance is the only possible happiness this world has to offer
Patrick Suskind
#38. With one glance he had got himself trapped in the brown fundament of her eyes, he was in danger of sinking, as if into a soft, brown swamp, and he had to close his own eyes for a second to get out of it..
Patrick Suskind
#39. 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
#40. Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?
Ron Suskind
#41. There was only one thing the perfume could not do. It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else. So, to hell with it he thought. To hell with the world. With the perfume. With himself
Patrick Suskind
#42. 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
#43. If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two,
Ron Suskind
#44. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.
Patrick Suskind
#45. 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
#46. He realized that all his life he had been a nobody to everyone. What he now felt was the fear of his own oblivion. It was as though he did not exist.
Patrick Suskind
#47. Author describes auto CEO's decisions to drive rather than fly to Washington as "showy penitence".
Ron Suskind
#48. What can we do? It's not dismissive or resigned. He really wants to know.
Ron Suskind
#49. When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.
Patrick Suskind
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself.
Patrick Suskind
#53. The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot.
Ron Suskind
#54. 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
#55. He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does.
Ron Suskind
#56. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
Patrick Suskind
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.
Patrick Suskind
#60. I'm a partisan, too. I'm in favor of AUTHENTICITY. US State Department veteran and U.N. refugee official Wendy Chamberlain
Ron Suskind
#61. He came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm's length.
Patrick Suskind
#62. 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
#63. The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.
Ron Suskind
#64. Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world.
Ron Suskind
#65. I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me.
Ron Suskind
#66. 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
#67. He possessed the power. He held it in his hand. A power stronger than the power of money or the power of terror or the power of death: the invincible power to command the love of mankind. There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself.
Patrick Suskind
#68. He was rebuilt, reconstituted by vengeance dressed up as high purpose.
Ron Suskind
#70. For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.
Ron Suskind
#71. As long as I don't have an idea, I won't write anything.
Patrick Suskind
#72. How quickly the apparently solidly laid foundation of one's existence could crumble.
Patrick Suskind
#73. 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
#74. He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans.
Patrick Suskind
#75. He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.
Patrick Suskind
#76. constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current.
Patrick Suskind
#77. But perhaps we ask too much of him. Perhaps he really was only a god.
Patrick Suskind
#78. 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
#79. We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ron Suskind
#80. The government of the world's most powerful nation is running furiously in place.
Ron Suskind
#81. Security is by far the city's predominant business.
Ron Suskind
#82. 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
#83. The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.
Ron Suskind
#84. He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice.
Patrick Suskind
#85. This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better ... it was completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine ...
Patrick Suskind
#86. He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors.
Patrick Suskind
#87. Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.
Ron Suskind
#88. Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.
Ron Suskind
#89. And finally - he was neither able nor willing to prevent it - the self-loathing dammed up inside him spilled over and gushed out, gushed out of glaring eyes that grew ever grimmer, angrier, beneath the rim of his cap, flooding the outside world as perfect, vulgar hate.
Patrick Suskind
#90. Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.
Ron Suskind
#91. Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs.
Patrick Suskind
#92. Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, "Respect denial." It's a powerful force.
Ron Suskind
#93. Mrs. Porter was fat, and her breath smelled like burnt newspapers.
Patrick Suskind
#94. Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.
Ron Suskind
#95. Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings.
Patrick Suskind
#96. I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.
Ron Suskind
#97. So spoke Grenouille the Great and, while the peasantry of scent danced and celebrated beneath him, he glided with wide-stretched wings down from his golden clouds, across the nocturnal fields of his soul, and home to his heart.
Patrick Suskind
#98. 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
#99. Talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.
Patrick Suskind
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
