Quotes About Negotiation

Let me out, or she dies!

You know me, Robert, when my passions flare, diplomacy is not my métier.

When my passions flare, diplomacy is not my métier

To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.

It doesn't pay to get into a serious battle over every acorn, but it also doesn't pay to back down over every acorn. It's important to be predictable to a certain extent, but it's also important not to be too predictable.

We make deals with the devil every day, metaphorically.

Getty's 55-cent-a-barrel royalty to the Saudis loomed over Aminoil's 35-cent royalty to Kuwait, the roughly 33-cent royalty that Aramco had just been compelled to pay the Saudis—and far overshadowed the 16½ cents that Anglo-Iranian and the Iraq Petroleum Company were paying in Iran and Iraq respectively, as well as the 15-cent royalty that the Kuwait Oil Company was paying.

Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people.

But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can't bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate "relationship" involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.

We send for him, laddie, we make him come to us. We play him on the home ground.' 'How does that help?' Sean asked. 'It gives us an advantage immediately - it makes him remember that he's the one doing the asking.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Peace is war by other means.

Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise.

Mostly these conversations were had over the telephone, burdened by the conceptual difficulties of conflicting priorities, generals talking to engineers, political deputies to architects.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.

You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.

You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that

A good author insists on being accepted on his own terms, and audiences must bicker awhile before they're willing to give in. One learns not to be resentful about this condition but to credit it to human nature.

the peoples led by Roosevelt and

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means." "Bullshit. It's cooperation.

Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to.

He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them.

Living with a couple of Scots hasn't been easy, you know. Graham and Angus have made me realize that the old saw is true—it's necessary to either kill a Scot or agree with him, you have no other choice.