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

“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.”

“Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience.”

“If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.”

“Silence is the invisibility of talking. I'd take half an argument over half a silence any day. And I'd take peace and quiet over a full-blown argument any other day, unless it's Tuesday.”

“You dont know anything about me.No, I know not everything about you. But I sense enough to know you have mistaken obsession with drive, guilt with injustice. I know you want to escape what you are,...”

“In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy...”

“When your view is criticized or even ridiculed on television, on radio talk show, or in a newspaper editorial, don't just react angrily. Take a moment to jot down on paper the person's main thesis ...”

“We are fed ideas in small sound bites that are really just the conclusions of particular beliefs. We do not examine what underpins these sound bites. If the sound bites are presented by a source we...”

“If I really wanted to say or ask anything important (to her imposing father) I could not trust my tongue to get it right.”

“We all have an unscientific weakness for being always in the right, and this weakness seems to be particularly common among professional and amateur politicians. But the only way to apply something...”

“Why don't these translation books just include general phrases that could be applied in a variety of situations like, "Say nothing unless it's in English"?”