Quotes from Ron Suskind

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

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

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.

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

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

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

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

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,'

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.

"What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…. That's not the way the world really works anymore…. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

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.

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

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

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

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

Those two great genies of wishful fulfillment – messianic fervor and technological power – have spotted each other. If they come together, the world, as it is now known, will no longer exist.

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?

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

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.

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

Denial and hope, of course, are cousins. Bring them together, you've got illusion.

Freshmen spend in unfathomable sitting on their beds – heads against the wall or propped pillows, semistudying or not, listening to music, catching a little TV, sending e-mail messages while flipping through yesterday's student newspaper and talking about "you know, nothing," which means everything. Just plain being is pretty darn interesting in those first few months of stay-up-as-late-as-you-want independence.