Quotes from Frank Luntz

My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.

We decide based on how people look; we decide based on how people sound; we decide based on how people are dressed. We decide based on their passion.

There are people still in the Republican Party that I believe practice the communication of anger, of disappointment, of regret, of pain, of sorrow, of suffering. That's not what the American people want to hear.

Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?

Politics is gut; commercials are gut.

I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.

What matters most in politics is personality. It's not issues; it's not image. It's who you are and what you represent.

I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history.

The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.

The best advertising and the best communication when it comes to business is that which makes you smile, that which makes you think, that which makes you ponder.

The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product.

The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it.

I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.

Preserving parks and open spaces is a winner because it doesn't need to be explained to everyday Americans.

Writing a book is the most difficult, anxiety-prone aspect of my life because the words that I put on paper are very serious to me.

When I started in this business, everybody said the Democrats were the better communicators because they sounded like social workers, and Republicans were awful because they sounded like morticians. In some cases. they actually dressed like morticians.

We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse.

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.

Republicans use think tanks to come up with a lot of their messages. The think tanks are the single worst, most undisciplined example of communication I've ever seen.

Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.

The language of America changed with the election of Bill Clinton, because with all due respect to my friends on the Republican side, Bill Clinton is the best communicator of the last 50 years. He felt your pain.

How I say it has as much of an impact on what people think of me as what I say.