Quotes from Ron Suskind

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The [Bush] 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 create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities [as] history's actors.

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?

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.

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.

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

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

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.

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

Two hours a day for two days per week. Four hours. At $7.25 an hour, that gave him a gross income of $29 a week. He is also now a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, the union that represents food workers, retail clerks, and farm workers. His monthly dues for the UFCW are $25, all taken out of his first week's check. That makes Owen arguably the most selfless labor activist in America, with 86 percent of his pay going to support his union.

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.

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

But it can get so lonely, talking to yourself." my son, Owen, finally says. "You have to live in the world." Ron Suskind ~ Life, Animated

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

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

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

Nonetheless, the fact remains; he had hope in a better world he could not yet see that overwhelmed the cries of "you can't" or "you won't" 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.