 We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest. |
| The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it. |
| In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we're actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we're into, provided that it's a healthy pursuit, it's a good thing. |
| Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you. |
| The language of America changed with the election of Bill Clinton, because with all due respect to my friends on the Republican side, Bill Clinton is the best communicator of the last 50 years. He felt your pain. |
| There's a lot of money with a lot of big law firms that have a tremendous amount at stake by getting the right language to convince the right jury that my client is either innocent or that the opposition is guilty. |
| The Republican National Committee hired me, and they hired me because they wanted someone who could look members straight in the eye and tell them the truth. |
| I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before. |
| The principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different. |
| We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse. |
| So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean. |
| The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger. |
| There are words that work, that are meant to explain and educate on policies that work, on products that work, on services that work. I'm not going to ever try to sell a lemon. I don't do that. |
| My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters. |
| Politics is gut; commercials are gut. |
| If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person. |
| It is acceptable to bring someone to tears if it explains to them in an emotional way why a product, a service, or a candidate is the right person, is the right thing to do. |
| I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history. |
