“I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, a...”

“You know I'm not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king's servant.”

“The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad...”

“Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.”

“The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.”

“Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief wit...”

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

“All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.”

“Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled wit...”

“Anytime you're tempted to upsell someone else, stop what you're doing and upserve instead.”

“Think about what you sell in terms of how it eases or prevents pain for your client.”

“The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and...”