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.
Moral action – humble and honest – is the tribute that power must at some point pay to reason.
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.
In this era of public survival through continuous storytelling, people want someone who might surprise them.
He was rebuilt, reconstituted by vengeance dressed up as high purpose.
A sense of messianic purpose makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president.
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
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?
Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they’ll be fired.
The whole game was about confidence, as it always was. Everything was fine—until it wasn’t.
Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence.
The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises.
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.
This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.
For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you’re a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.
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.
One world leader warned another “the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need.
If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two,
Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.
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.
Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.
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 is now judging himself, harshly, by his captors’ rules.
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.
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.
Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.
It’s exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying.
It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them.
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.
I’m [Paul O’Neill] an old guy, and I’m rich. And there’s nothing they can do to hurt me.
These were lobbyists—many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.
Security is by far the city’s predominant business.
Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.