My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.

It is acceptable to bring someone to tears if it explains to them in an emotional way why a product, a service, or a candidate is the right person, is the right thing to do.

The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger.

People like me have to have the discipline only to work for clients, corporations, political people, products, services, networks that we believe in and we want to see succeed.

There are words that work, that are meant to explain and educate on policies that work, on products that work, on services that work. I'm not going to ever try to sell a lemon. I don't do that.

Politics is gut; commercials are gut.

I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.

Words can sometimes be used to confuse, but it's up to the practitioners of the study of language to apply them for good and not for evil. It is just like fire; fire can heat your house or burn it down.

The Republican National Committee hired me, and they hired me because they wanted someone who could look members straight in the eye and tell them the truth.

When I started in this business, everybody said the Democrats were the better communicators because they sounded like social workers, and Republicans were awful because they sounded like morticians. In some cases. they actually dressed like morticians.

We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

The language of America changed with the election of Bill Clinton, because with all due respect to my friends on the Republican side, Bill Clinton is the best communicator of the last 50 years. He felt your pain.

The fundamental problem for Republicans when it comes to the environment is that whatever you say is viewed through the prism of suspicion.

There are people still in the Republican Party that I believe practice the communication of anger, of disappointment, of regret, of pain, of sorrow, of suffering. That's not what the American people want to hear.

Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?

My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.

What matters most in politics is personality. It's not issues; it's not image. It's who you are and what you represent.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

One of the things that you have trouble with politicians, particularly in Washington, is when you get mad at them and you can't touch them; you can't punch them; you can't yell at them.

In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we're actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we're into, provided that it's a healthy pursuit, it's a good thing.

The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product.

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.

There's a lot of money with a lot of big law firms that have a tremendous amount at stake by getting the right language to convince the right jury that my client is either innocent or that the opposition is guilty.

The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it.

The principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different.

How I say it has as much of an impact on what people think of me as what I say.

We decide based on how people look; we decide based on how people sound; we decide based on how people are dressed. We decide based on their passion.

Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.

Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you.

We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse.

If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person.

It's all emotion. But there's nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are on vacation, we are not rational; we are emotional.

I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.

Preserving parks and open spaces is a winner because it doesn't need to be explained to everyday Americans.

There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.

I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history.

Republicans use think tanks to come up with a lot of their messages. The think tanks are the single worst, most undisciplined example of communication I've ever seen.

The problem is people become so angry. And they become so vicious.

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

I believe that if a man does a job as well as a woman, he should be paid as much.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

You really should not do this job unless you're willing to put in that enormous amount of effort. You should not do the job unless you're willing to take risks. And you shouldn't do the job unless you're willing to lose the job, too.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.

Even if I don't have a job, I work on plays and scenes.

In the middle of a recession no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated.

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.