Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent.

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

Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, "Respect denial." It's a powerful force.

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.

You try to hold on to some notions you might have had before, that this will somehow work out, this is a spell that will lift or be broken.

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.

It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them.