Ron Suskind Quotations

From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it -- the president saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'

He got the documents from lawyers at the Treasury Department when he made a request after he left.

Haven't we already given money to rich people... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?

We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Other administrations ceded to fact, and saw the benefit - the value - to meaningful public dialogue based on fact. They understood that was one of their obligations, to engage with people who were there to ask pointed and pertinent questions and demand answers to them. They understood that's how it worked and that that was the precedent. This administration has said, 'What does that have to do with me'?

A carefully vetted group of more than 240 executives, economists, and even a few labor leaders was being assembled. They'd seem diverse and independent to the untrained eye. In fact, nearly every one would be a Bush supporter and many were major fundraisers. Attendance was, in a way, a reward for support.

I am not pro-Bush or anti-Bush. I am pro-facts.

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

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

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.

I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.

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

Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent.

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.

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.

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

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

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

When you get people standing up saying, 'I'm going to just tell the truth; what do we have to fear?,' it encourages others, and it creates a counterresponse.

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.

Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Two sons, they'll both be presidents after they win their Nobel Prizes. And the daughters, they'll be prima ballerinas before they become the president of Princeton and start their Internet company. And I just started to think about What's the conventional load of those expectations you carry around? You have to pull them out one by one and smash them in the corner. You realize the pile is quite high. But in a way, it becomes oddly liberating to do that.

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.

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

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating new realities ... we're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Confidence is the public face of competence,

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