"Philosophers will always have logical reasons for avoiding the good—and those reasons will always hang on their lust for material goods. A man who has little thinks little of sharing it; but the man who has much will clutch it with his dying fingers."

"The nag is as fat as a monk—and will stop to eat at every chance, so the resemblance is no happenstance."

"It is always amazing to see how wide a spectrum of results can be obtained from replicating an identical negotiation with different principal actors; it makes no difference whether there subjects are inexperienced or whether they are senior executives and young presidents of business firms. That is an important lesson to be learned here."

"The need is not for the creation of new analytical techniques specially designed for the negotiation process, but rather for the creative use of analytical thinking that exploits existing techniques."

"Disputants often fare poorly when they each act greedily and deceptively."

"It's worth repeating here, though, because we are talking about mechanisms for resolving conflict and many people don't realize it's impossible to devise a foolproof scheme."

"We act like a zero-sum society, when in reality there is a lot of non zero-sum fat to be skimmed off to everyone's mutual advantage."

"A lot depends on the starting point."

"the mediation of internal conflicts can be resolved by linkages with other problems."

"Most people, even in simple risky situations, don't behave the way the theory of utility would have them behave."

"The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up."

"A final word of advice: don't gloat about how well you have done."

"Final-offer arbitration should have great appeal for the daring (the risk seekers) who play against the timid (the risk avoiders)."

"It's easy, of course, for two teams to collude, but somewhat more difficult for twenty-eight-"

"After a little reflection, the best strategy becomes clear: bid aggressively up to a maximum cutoff value and then quit."

"Each party tended to view its own chances in court as better than the other side viewed them."

"Advice: don't embarrass your bargaining partner by forcing him or her to make all the concessions."

"The best practical advice then is: try to maximize your expected payoff, which is the sum of all payoffs multiplied by probabilities."

"A mediator is an impartial outsider who tries to aid the negotiators in their quest to find a compromise agreement."

"The party that negotiates in haste is often at a disadvantage."

"There is no shortage of disputes."

"Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem."

"Ideas are incestuous."

"It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought."

"The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this."

"Common language — or, at least, the English language — has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this. To interpret the first kind of statement in the ontological sense is to assert that one’s own private thoughts and sensations are realities existing externally in Nature. We call this the ‘mind projection fallacy’, and note the trouble it causes many times in what follows. But this trouble is hardly confined to probability theory; as soon as it is pointed out, it becomes evident that much of the discourse of philosophers and Gestalt psychologists, and the attempts of physicists to explain quantum theory, are reduced to nonsense by the author falling repeatedly into the mind projection fallacy."

"In principle, the only operations which a machine cannot perform for us are those which we cannot describe in detail, or which could not be completed in a finite number of steps."

"All scientific work is incomplete – whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time."

"Which would you rather have? A kid with obesity, heart problems, shortened lifespan, diabetes -- or maybe a little bit of false memory?"

"Even if it's going to be a harmful memory, they don't want to let it go. (This is) why sometimes I get such resistance to the work I do. Because it's telling people that your mind might be full of much more fiction than you realize. And people don't like that."

"The problem is clear: the unreliability of eyewitness identification evidence poses one of the most serious problems in the administration of criminal justice and civil litigation."

"To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything."

"In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened."

"The results were clear: the new environment inhibited recognition."

"I collaborated on a brain imaging study in 2010, and the overwhelming conclusion we reached is that the neural patterns were very similar for true and false memories. We are a long way away from being able to look at somebody's brain activity and reliably classify an authentic memory versus one that arose through some other process."

"Therapists probably can't ethically do it, and they may have anti-deception provisions in their standards of conduct. But bad governments, bad people, they don't have requirements of conduct. When we recently published a study about planting false memories among U.S. soldiers, I was worried we were putting out a recipe for how you can do horrible things to somebody and then wipe their memory away."

"It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in order to go on in life, you had to wall off this memory, because it would be too painful to live with. Then finally you go into therapy and crack through the repression barrier and out comes this pristine memory. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion."

"Memory works like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people."

"The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data."

"The tool that is so dull that you cannot cut yourself on it is not likely to be sharp enough to be either useful or helpful."

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

"Utility is the emotion pleading to be let into the house of pure reason and thereby enriching it."

"Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4."

"Consider the case of a person who holds a view with probability 1. Then coherence says that it is no use having a debate with them because nothing will change their mind."

"In teaching there can be too much emphasis on certainty and a proper appreciation of uncertainty is to be encouraged."

"It is not merely a question of calculating with probabilities but also one of relating the ingredients of your probability statements to reality. You do not need to think only about p(E|K) but also about the precise nature of E and K."

"Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it."

"The grand assertion is that you must see the world through probability and that probability is the only guide you need."