Rex Stout Quotes

Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?

It's especially important since September 11 for people to be trained for the unexpected. We want to try to make sure people are safe.

It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.

The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be 'What the hell you mean we're out of missiles?'

Given Mr. Obama's lack of experience as an executive, and his past performance in crises such as the oil spill, it is reasonable for those of us who support the effort in Afghanistan to worry that he will not be up to the job.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

A President in a ... crisis makes, say, 10 bets a day. Maybe I made the wrong choice three times.

When presidents are in trouble, there's two things they always do: reshuffle the staff and call in a bunch of reporters for advice.

Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.

When something catastrophic happens to someone you love, or a situation arises that affects people you love the most, if that's the first time you've been in that position, you never really know what to do.

Crisis is not a nine-to-five job... Crisis happens when you least expect it.

When you hear 'experience,' that's all about resume. And Obama didn't have the resume. But we knew, long before that, 'steady in a crisis' was much more important than 'experience.' When you watched the presidential campaign, you saw that Obama was the one who happened to be steady... He demonstrated aspects of his character people were hungry for.

Really, people are not a school of fish. Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.

I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.

For years I have told my students that I been trying to train executives rather than clerks. The distinction between the two is parallel to the distinction previously made between understanding and knowledge. It is a mighty low executive who cannot hire several people with command of more knowledge than he has himself.

People help each other through a crisis by each supposing that the other can handle it better than he himself can.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

It is the individual's ability to deal with the unexpected that characterizes the difference between success and failure.

There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.

When the going gets weird, anchormen punt.

No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?

Making a movie is a weird combination of planning and the absolutely unexpected.

I offer myself as a leader to the people of this country because I think they're looking for solutions, not lawyers arguing over laws or entertainers throwing out sound bites that draw media attention. We need to solve the problem.

A man cannot spend his life worrying about the unexpected.

There was a guy with mental illness in the middle of the street just yelling and hollering. I have a number that I can call - it's not 911 - to tell them, "You need to help this man get out of the street." But you have to be that person, you have to pick up the phone, you have to do it; you can't just walk by and act like they're not people. They're somebody's kid, somebody's dad, somebody's brother.