38 Quotes Tagged: persuasion

"Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées."

("It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.")

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.

I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.

Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing

Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.

"Steve's head dropped and stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. " Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"
Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other than to acquiesce. " He had a uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person," Sculley recalled. "

Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance ones ability to persuade.

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

To be persuasive we must be believable;
to be believable we must be creditable;
to be credible we must be truthful.

I once found myself conspiring with a president of the Board of Trade as to how we might persuade H.M. Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said Sir David Eccles, “Why does any American in his senses spend his holidays in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian advertising is the answer.” Quite so.