Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

The first problem of communication is getting people's attention.

Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.

Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something. But it's the next best thing. And the right kind of a story is a simulation.

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?

Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can't control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.

What’s working, and how can we do more of it?

The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

The Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it's preceded by the huh experience.

He had a face like a benediction.

When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened.

I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ... if I can't take him with me, I don't want to go.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Every hero is the villain of his own story.

I always felt very secure and very safe with real estate. Real estate always appreciates.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

Why are people saying it's too soon? Like the people on that flight, we need to agree about what to do about terrorism. And I think we need to have that conversation now.

Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.