“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”

“She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new...”

“All empires fall, eventually. But why? Its not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power a...”

“Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled peoples brains for some reason, that just amu...”

“ 'You can't stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn't work on me. Right? So how do you think you're going to-' Eliot produced a pistol. He didn't seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it....”

“It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.”

“You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indec...”

“The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always wit...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.”

“You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think thats the same as going there.”

“If you are a beautiful lair, you are the most wanted person in the world.”