The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.

The military wants more freedom of action. The State Department wants to sustain existing relationships and arrangements.

the 1990s—a high-water mark for American influence in the world—Holbrooke

He used to complain when people used the word “fulsome” as a synonym for “robust,” because it actually is a synonym for “noxious”—he’d look at me whenever the word was used incorrectly in a meeting, an eyebrow slightly raised.

and I, where armies of lawyers and lobbyists made their way to soulless eight-story office buildings, and walk south among a dwindling group of people making their way to the White House.

There is always something sad about the last night of these trips. They consume you for weeks, they move you around—without sleep—for days. You stay in beautiful places, see strange things, meet famous people, and develop an intense camaraderie with the people you are with. But I felt like it was impossible to explain these things to people back home—my wife, my parents, my old friends. It was like you inhabited two parallel lives—one that made you who you were, and the other that was consuming that person, and transforming you into someone else.

Ending a war in which there is no clear victory is an anticlimactic thing.

YOUNG MEN WAGE WAR, OLD MEN MAKE PEACE

I was a man, no longer young, who—in the zigzag of history—still believed in the truth within the stories of people around the world, a truth that compels me to see the world as it is, and to believe in the world as it ought to be.