Ron Suskind Quotes

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

Confidence is the public face of competence.

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

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

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.

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

The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly - he's not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?

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.

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

The idea that our son would be like Raymond Babbitt was a shocking reordering of everything. And something we couldn't quite fathom, really.

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.

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

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

You try to hold on to some notions you might have had before, that this will somehow work out, this is a spell that will lift or be broken.

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

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.

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.

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.

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

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.

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 you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.