“To Ronald Wilson Regan, The Fortieth President of The United States: The Man Who Won The War.”
“To Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Won the War.”
“People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.”
“Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?” the President asked with a wry smile. “Diplomacy.”
“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.”
“It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.”
“If the First Toddler wears it, it has to be fashionable.”
“It’s going to be hard writing for you. I can’t dip into the usual well. I have to learn to write the way I used to like to write, not the way I’m paid to write,”
“A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.”
“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.”
“thing, most deadly of all to those who hold it in their earthly hands. For yourself, you must decide. What sort of leader do you wish to be, and with what other leaders”
“A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.”
“It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.”
“How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.”
“Reporters called down every other profession—medicine, law, politics—for failing to meet a level of professional responsibility which they would allow no one to enforce on themselves, and which they themselves would too rarely enforce on their own. Do as I say, not as I do was something you couldn’t say to a six-year-old, but it had become a ready cant for grown-ups. And if it got any worse, then what?”
“Not every story started off big enough to notice.”
“The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job.”
“A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn't know.”
“He was carrying nothing illegal, except for that which was in his head.”
“Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.”
“Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth.”
“They loved their country largely because they controlled it.”
“THERE IS NO such thing as magic. That was merely the word people used to explain something so cleverly done that there was no ready explanation for it, and the simplest technique employed by its practitioners was to distract the audience with one moving and obvious hand (usually in a white glove) while the other was doing something else.”
“Actually there are,” the President said, after a moment’s reflection. “The problem is that they never come here to work. You know who I learned that from? Cathy,” Jack told him. “She fucks up, somebody goes blind, but she can’t run away from making the call, can she? Imagine, you fuck up, and somebody loses his sight forever—or dies. The guys who work the emergency room are really on the ragged edge, like when Cathy and Sally went into Shock-Trauma. You blow the call, and somebody is gone forever. Big deal, George, bigger than trading equities like we used to do. Same thing with cops. Same thing with soldiers. You have to make the call, right now, or something really bad happens. But those kinds of people don’t come here to Washington, do they? And mainly that sort of guy goes to the place he—or she—has to be, where the real action is,” Ryan said, almost wistfully. “The really good ones go where they’re needed, and they always seem to know where that is.” “But the really good ones don’t like the bullshit. So they don’t come here?” Winston asked, getting his own course in Government 101, and finding Ryan a teacher of note. “Some do. Adler at State. Another guy over there I’ve discovered, name of Vasco. But those are the ones who buck the system. The system works against them. Those are the ones we have to identify and protect. Mostly little ones, but what they do isn’t little. They keep the system running, and mainly they go unnoticed because they don’t care much about being noticed. They care about getting it done, serving the people out there. You know what I’d really like to do?” Ryan asked, for the first time revealing something from the depths of his soul. He hadn’t even had the guts to say this to Arnie.”
“hadn’t even had the guts to say this to Arnie. “Yeah, set up a system that really works, a system that recognizes the good ones and gives them what they deserve. You know how hard that is in any organization? Hell, it was a struggle at my shop, and Treasury has more janitors than I had trading executives. I’m not even sure where to start a job like that,” Winston said. He would be one to grasp the scope of the dream, his President thought. “Harder than you think, even. The guys who really do the work don’t want to be bosses. They want to work. Cathy could be an administrator. They offered her the chair at the University of Virginia Medical School—and that would have been a big deal. But it would have cut her patient time in half, and she likes doing what she does. Someday Bernie Katz at Hopkins is going to retire, and they’ll offer his chair to her, and she’ll turn that down. Probably,” Jack thought. “Unless I can talk her out of it.” “Can’t be done, Jack.” TRADER shook his head. “Hell of an idea, though.” “Grover Cleveland reformed the Civil Service over a hundred years ago,” POTUS reminded his breakfast guest. “I know we can’t make it perfect, but we can make it better. You’re already trying—you just told me that. Think about it some.” “I’ll do that,” SecTreas promised, standing. “But for now, I have another revolution to foment. How many enemies can we afford to make?” “There’s always enemies, George. Jesus had enemies.”
“The allocation of research money was a political act.”
“When the French high command had got wind of the German Schlieffen Plan prior to World War I, their reaction had been, “So much the better for us!” That assault had barely ground to a halt outside Paris. In 1940, the same high command had greeted initial news of another German attack with smiles—and that attack had ended at the Spanish border. The problem was that people tended to wed their ideas more faithfully than their spouses, and the tendency was universal. It”
“He’s already run the standard battery of questions, checked the check boxes, computed the data: hears voices = schizophrenic; too agitated = paranoid; too bright = manic; too moody = bipolar; and of course everyone knows a depressive, a suicidal, and if you’re all-around too unruly or obstructive or treatment resistant like a superbug, you get slapped with a personality disorder, too. In Crote Six, they said I “suffer” from schizoaffective disorder. That’s like the sampler plate of diagnoses, Best of Everything.
But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.”
“I’ve been so busy I haven’t managed to contact her since this morning, but she’s been hovering at the edge of my consciousness all day, like a guardian angel. My guardian angel. Ever present but not intrusive.”
“He suddenly became convinced that if he didn’t do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wondering round the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.”
“For this will cure him that is sick, and rouse him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct. For there was never any yet that wholly could escape love, and never shall there be any, never so long as beauty shall be, never so long as eyes can see. But help me that God to write the passions of others; and while I write, keep me in my own right wits.”
“I began my mindfulness exercises and focused on how the water felt against my skin, how my toes felt as I raised my feet and they came into contact with the bubbles on the surface, and the pressure of the tub against my back. I focused on my breathing and allowed it to become slower and deeper, letting my tummy rise and fall instead of my back and shoulders. Then, as I was at my most relaxed, I pushed my bum forward, opened my mouth, slipped my head underwater and took the biggest gulp of water I could until it flooded my lungs. My brain’s immediate reaction was to force myself to the surface and cough the water out, but I fought hard against it and remained underneath, thrashing about like a fish caught in a net.”
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