Red Rabbit

Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.

(Stereotyping) is only for those without the imagination to see people as they are instead of being like someone else they understand.

Every country in the world had a bureaucracy, whose entire purpose was to delay important things from happening.

At this table, a loud voice was just a man venting his stress. A quiet one was far more dangerous.

Either people were trustworthy or they were not.

never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.

You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience—but experience often came from bad decisions.

Bad money drives out good.’ That means poor performance will take over if good performance isn’t recognized.

the only difference between a wise man and a fool was in the magnitude of his mistakes. To err was human, and the smarter and more powerful you were, the greater the scope of your screwup.

Robert, that’s a little too far off the wall, I think,” Greer analyzed.

All men had their limitations. It was just that some were more dangerous than others. And while genius knew it had limits, idiocy was always unbounded.

But it could have been worse. He did have a pass to shop for food at the Army–Air Force Exchange Service—otherwise known as the PX at nearby Greenham Commons Air Base—so at least they’d have proper hot dogs, and brands that resembled the ones he bought at the Giant at home in Maryland.

And this letter threatened change, didn’t it? It was a threat, and he might have to do something about the threat. That meant doing something about the man behind it. It had happened before. It could happen again, he decided. Andropov would not live long enough to learn that in considering this action, he would set in motion the demise of his own country.

office just wasn’t a very good place for thinking, but every executive in the world pretended it was. Christ

No man controlled his fate, a knowledge that came late in life. You just tried to muddle along from one point to another, making as few mistakes as possible.