"Of all the things that influence elections, it appears that information is the least significant. Elections are won by the candidate whose staff members are the most skilled at manipulating the voters. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because you have to be quite smart to figure out the best way to manipulate millions of Induhviduals into marching in the same direction."

"Technology magnifies the ability of one person to have a big impact on other people. If that doesn't scare you, then the next time you see professional wrestling on television, look at the crowd shots and ask yourself if you'd like those people to have a bigger impact on your life."

"People don't change their basic nature, they just accumulate more stuff upon which they can apply their stupidity, selfishness, and horniness. From this perspective, the future isn't hard to predict."

"The most efficient way to implement an empowerment program is to have meetings where you punish people for the decisions they made while at the same time encouraging people in the group to think for themselves. Eventually, the employees become numb, thus developing a healthy tolerance to the hopelessness of their situation. Hopelessness isn't the same as happiness, but it's enough to make the employees stop complaining, and that's a good start."

"Rumors are an excellent way to keep your employees nervous and edgy, which is similar to being alert. Actually, it's better. When they're alert they realize what you're doing to them and they resist. But when they're edgy they work like crazed bumblebees and die of stress before they become cynical. In other words, everyone wins."

"When you have an exceptionally nasty project, present it to your employee as a "challenge." That seemingly minor change in syntax will cause the employee to feel like an Olympic athlete instead of the boot-stomped carpet mite that he is."

"When we are born, all humans are clueless, self-absorbed, and helpless. Most babies will grow out of it. Those who don't become managers."

"Always "lead by example." Let's say you're trying to reduce costs in the company. You can set an example by ordering your chauffeur to get his hair cut at Super Cuts. This is the kind of personal sacrifice that inspires the employees. Soon you'll be able to squeeze their health benefits like a tourniquet on a seedless grape."

"As a manager you could do a lot of thinking, experimenting, and continuous training. Or you can just do what everyone else does and blindly follow my directions like an unthinking zombie. Blind obedience is easier than the alternatives and the pay's the same. In fact, the pay is better, if you look at it from an hourly perspective."

"I have a saying: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.""

"The most important skill for any leader is the ability to take credit for things that happen on their own."

"The goal of change management is to dupe slow-witted employees into thinking change is good for them by appealing to their sense of adventure and love of challenge. This is like convincing a trout to leap out of a stream to experience the adventure of getting deboned."

"Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole."

"I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows."

"If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.""

"Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism."

"In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."

"It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life."

"The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU."

"If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven."

"Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour."

"You will always have some excuse not to live your life."

"Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world."

"Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be."

"Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile."

"That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell."

"Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don't recognize as real."

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."

"Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288"

"People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves."

""The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

""I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76"

"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences."

"We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one."

"If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more."

"That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed."

"Chapter 19, Absolution"

"We should forgive God..."

"The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look."

"I lost my virginity through my ear."

"With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved."

""What matters," Sister Vigilante says, "is, people need a monster they can believe in." A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us."

""Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you." p205"

"As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'"

"This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat."

"You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle."

"For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die."