A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.
If you give people a firm opinion, you run the risk of being wrong. Guess what? People remember when you’re wrong a lot more often than when you’re right. So the tendency is to include all the possibilities. It’s intellectually honest, even.
At this table, a loud voice was just a man venting his stress. A quiet one was far more dangerous.
The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest.
People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.
Courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits.
Politicians are more concerned with “issues” than “principles,” but talked as though the two nouns had the same meaning.
It’s a leadership function. They taught me that at Quantico. The troops have to see you doing the job. They have to know you’re there for them.” And I have to be sure that it’s all real, that I actually am the President.
Diplomacy “was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.
The media “could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.
All history is really nothing more than the application of ideology to the past.
The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value.
War is the ultimate criminal act, an armed robbery writ large. And it’s always about greed. It’s always a nation that wants something another nation has. And you defeat that nation by recognizing what it wants and denying it to them.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is not the job of government to be the national nanny. The average citizen can look after his or her own needs without assistance from somebody who works here in Washington.
The human mind has a way of punishing itself for killing a fellow man. It remembers and relives the incident again and again.
It wasn’t an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.
Diplomatic exchange combined the worst aspects of explaining things to a toddler and talking with a mother-in-law. It was dull, it was tedious, it was exasperating, and it was necessary.
If the First Toddler wears it, it has to be fashionable.
There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you.
Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.