‘And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants...

Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That’s a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn’t read because books are her job and...

That’s the thing you learn about values: they’re what people make up to justify what they did.

steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business...

Over time, there would be less and less of him and more of the tumor. His brain was being eaten by God. He left the clinic in fine spirits. He had no intention of removing...

You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I don’t even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big...

Sometimes I worry about this country.

My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things,...

I felt vaguely outraged that such a bad person had such a good car. Because the car was the culmination of a thousand-odd years of scientific advancement. But the guy was a dick. I wondered...

‘Your brain doesn’t process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.’ ‘I have a superior brain?’ ‘Uh,’ Eliot said, ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.

It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn’t need to argue for the truth. You could see it.

Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.

You went to school,” Lee said. “I mean, at some point. And it didn’t suit you very well. They wanted to teach you things you didn’t care about. Dates and math and trivia about dead...

She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented...

Well, I like to know where I’m going before I try to get there. It’s a mistake to try to execute a plan before you’ve thought of one, in my experience.

I usually like to interact with people who don’t speak until it’s necessary but I was intimidated by Carl’s physique. I didn’t feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success...

But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those...

The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I’ll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.

Warum wollen sie unbedingt, dass ich den Auftrag storniere?’ Der Mann klingt auf einmal misstrauisch. ‘Seid ihr überbucht?”Ich will Ihnen nur helfen. Wirklich, unsere Kurse sind grottenschlecht. Es ist immer die gleiche Teamwork-Botschaft, nur unter...

I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two… But now I realized this was...

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.

Verstehst du, im Grunde sind doch die Mitarbeiter das Problem. Du zahlst, wenn du sie einstellst, du zahlst, wenn du sie rausschmeißt, und dazwischen muss du sie auch noch bezahlen.

Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused...

She looked at her note cards and took a breath. “Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald’s. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France,...

Du weißt doch noch, die Leute beschweren sich immer beim Management, dass ihre Work-Life-Balance nicht mehr stimmt. Also, am nächsten Montag haben sie eine Personalversammlung zu diesem Thema angesetzt. Um acht Uhr früh.

What we’re doing, or, I should say, what you’re doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people’s brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters....

There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

Fifteen years ago, this would have been insider trading, but that quaint concept had disappeared a decade or two ago when so many brokers were doing it that it was impossible to jail them all....

‘You can’t stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn’t work on me. Right? So how do you think you’re going to-‘ Eliot produced a pistol. He didn’t seem to pull it from anywhere. He just...

[S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.

She didn’t really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn’t fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of...

What was it Like?””What was what like?” he said, although he knew.”Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light.” “It was like...

Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave...