When you get people standing up saying, 'I'm going to just tell the truth; what do we have to fear?,' it encourages others, and it creates a counterresponse.

The idea that our son would be like Raymond Babbitt was a shocking reordering of everything. And something we couldn't quite fathom, really.

Two sons, they'll both be presidents after they win their Nobel Prizes. And the daughters, they'll be prima ballerinas before they become the president of Princeton and start their Internet company. And I just started to think about What's the conventional load of those expectations you carry around? You have to pull them out one by one and smash them in the corner. You realize the pile is quite high. But in a way, it becomes oddly liberating to do that.

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack.

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

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

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.