Quotes from Ron Suskind

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.

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.

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

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.

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

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

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

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.