Quotes About Persuasion

Men listened closer to calm tones than to the loudest shouts, so long as firmness and certainty accompanied the calm.

In any trade, you needed to make the other fellow think he was getting something extra

a victory of diplomacy did not come when everyone got what they wanted—that made everyone assume they'd gotten the better of her, which encouraged more extravagant demands. The trick is not to satisfy everyone, but to leave everyone feeling they reached the best possible result. They must be satisfied enough to do as you wish, yet dissatisfied enough to know that you bested them.

Some women," Dyelin murmured into her wine, "can make a fish bite by crooking a finger, Lady Birgitte. Other women have to drag their bait all over the pond.

power often grew from others deciding that you already had power, and an appearance of wealth could give that.

Men always seemed to think violence could solve anything. If she had had a stout stick, she would have thumped all three of them about the shoulders until they saw reason.

Women seemed to make up their minds whether you were lying without looking at the evidence. On the other hand, if they liked you, they either did not care or else decided even the most outrageous lie was true.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right. As one grows old it is easier still.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was explicit about the importance of presidents "persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always, because the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don't listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic.

If you want to be a leader of people, then you need to be a master of words.

The ability to sell—to communicate to another human being, be it a customer, employee, boss, spouse, or child—is the base skill of personal success.

Communication skills such as writing, speaking, and negotiating are crucial to a life of success.

Remember, all con men are nice people. If they were not being nice by telling you what you want to hear, you would not listen to them.

knowing which words work on which kinds of people.

The most important specialized skills are sales and marketing. The ability to sell—to communicate to another human being, be it a customer, employee, boss, spouse, or child—is the base skill of personal success.

Your ability to sell—to communicate and position your strengths—directly impacts your success.

No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.

How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.

Kevin, yours won so many arguments that she was made a teacher