"Nihilism, then, is the end process of rationalism. It is man's self conscious will to destroy his past and control his future. It is modernity at its extreme."

"Religions grow out of the deepest needs of individuals sharing a common awakening, and are not created by "engineers of the soul.""

"That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end."

"I’ve called myself a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. I’m a socialist in economics because I believe that every society has an obligation to give people that degree of decency to allow them to feel that they are citizens in this society... I’m a conservative in culture because I believe in continuity, and I believe in judgment. I don’t believe that all opinions in culture are the same as everybody else’s opinion. I don’t believe that all art is the same. Some things are better than others, and you have to justify why it’s better than others, and you have to understand the grounds of justification. I’m a liberal in politics but liberalism has no fixed dogmas. It has no fixed points, that you can say, “This is the liberal position.” It changes because it’s an attitude. It’s a skepticism. It’s a pluralism, it’s agnostic."

"I was born in galut [exile] and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me."

"The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul."

"I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word."

"The achievement of happiness requires not the ... satisfaction of our needs ... but the examination and transformation of those needs."

"The creative scientist lives in a 'wildness of logic,' where reason is the handmaiden and not the master."

"Discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and in which unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth."

"I do not mean that selling is ignored. Far from it. But selling, again, is not marketing. As already pointed out, selling concerns it with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs. The customer is somebody "out there" who, with proper cunning, can be separated from his loose change."

"The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it."

"The historic fate of one growth industry after another has been its suicidal product provincialism."

"Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others, which are thought of as seasoned growth industries, have actually stopped growing. In every case the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management."

"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole."

"Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things. The difference speaks for itself. Yet the fluent advisers to business seldom make the distinction. They tend to rate ideas more by their novelty than by their practicability."

"In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization."

"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."

"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."

"Ideas are incestuous."

"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."

"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-"

"In successful transformations, the president, division general manager, or department head plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improved performance pull together as a team."

"We see, we feel, we change."

"A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time."

"In a change effort, culture comes last, not first."

"We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture."

"Valued achievements connect to people at a deeper level—and a deeper level can change behavior that is generally very difficult to change."

"The rate of change in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up over the next few decades. Enterprises everywhere will be presented with even more terrible hazards and wonderful opportunities, driven by the globalization of the economy along with related technological and social trends"

"One of the most powerful forms of information is feedback on our own actions."

"Without conviction that you can make change happen, you will not act, even if you see the vision. Your feelings will hold you back."

"Never underestimate the power of the mind to disempower."