Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.

I think that [Barack Obama] does say something that's - that is telling on that score, when he talks about the [George W.] Bush tax cuts and the swap he makes after the midterm elections, which is he doesn't agree with the Bush tax cuts.

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.

[Barack Obama] says at one point, "[Jimmy] Carter, [Bill] Clinton and I suffer from," what he called, "the policy wonk's disease."

If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again

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.