Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

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 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.

The whole game was about confidence, as it always was. Everything was fine—until it wasn't.

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.

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

He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does.

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.

Author describes auto CEO's decisions to drive rather than fly to Washington as "showy penitence".

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

The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises.

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.

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.

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