Top 40 Ron Suskind Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.”

— Ron Suskind

2. “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

3. “Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, “Respect denial.” It’s a powerful force.”

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

5. “Every person has their pantheon – the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare – their way of understanding the world.”

— Ron Suskind

6. “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

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

— Ron Suskind

8. “It’s exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying.”

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

10. “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

11. “Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.”

— Ron Suskind

12. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

13. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

14. “The informed, unmanaged question. That’s the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.”

— Ron Suskind

15. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

16. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

19. “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

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

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

23. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

24. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

26. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

29. “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

30. “Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.”

— Ron Suskind

31. “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

32. “The government of the world’s most powerful nation is running furiously in place.”

— Ron Suskind

33. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

34. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

35. “A little known area often defines the fortunes of leaders – management skills.”

— Ron Suskind

36. “Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?”

— Ron Suskind

37. “I don’t have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.”

— Ron Suskind

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

— Ron Suskind

39. “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.”

— Ron Suskind

40. “These were lobbyists – many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.”

— Ron Suskind