Ron Suskind Quotes

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

Moral action – humble and honest – is the tribute that power must at some point pay to reason.

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness.

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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.

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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.

~ Ron Suskind

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.

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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.

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

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

~ Ron Suskind

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

~ Ron Suskind

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

~ Ron Suskind