Negotiation Quotes

“Everything is a negotiation with you, Brekker. You probably bartered your way out of the womb.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
― ram dass

“Gabe scratched his double chin. "Maybe if you hurry with the seven-layer dip...And maybe if the kid apologizes for interrupting my poker game."
Maybe if I kick you in your soft spot, I thought. And make you sing Soprano for a week.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]”
― John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“There are many goals but one path - the path of compassion.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."

[ The Berlin Crisis: Radio and Television Address to the American People (The White House, July 25, 1961)]”
― John F. Kennedy

“When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.”
― John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

“It was obvious that the key to a settlement was less about the financial terms than the fact that he wanted to be shown respect.”
― Mark C. Zauderer, Counsel, the Courtroom Is Open: Lessons from More Than a Half-Century in Law and Life

“Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Sasha, the world is full of entities that people cannot negotiate with. But somehow people survive, don’t they?”
― Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra

“But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katronia noticed [Rosie] had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as "supposing you ever want to eat again") eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katronia keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.”
― Robin McKinley, Spindle's End

“We’re all somebody’s prospect; we’re all somebody’s customer.”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“International peace negotiations need more value creation than value claiming. The more we create value for peace and development, the easier it is going to be to claim value for a nuclear weapons free world.”
― Amit Ray, Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth

“It was a monumental achievement that the serpentine tc'a had once upon a time gotten the knnn to understand the concept of trade: so nowadays knnn simply contacted a station, rushed onto its methane-dock and deposited whatever they liked, grabbed whatever they wanted and left. This was an improvement over their former behavior, in which they simply looted and left.”
― C.J. Cherryh, The Kif Strike Back

“The key to resolving international conflict with a positive outcome includes looking for a win-win situation, finding common ground, formulating proactive strategies, using effective negotiation and communication, and appreciating cultural differences.”
― Amit Ray, Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth

“Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.”
― Michael A. Stackpole

“Think about it: if someone had found a way to manipulate human choice and free will – if someone actually had that kind of power – wouldn’t it be a tad surprising if they then decided to share their secret with the masses in a book for $20? Not to mention how it would be just very slightly unethical.”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“Any negotiation has a limit.
Otherwise, war is irrelevant.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Focusing on Earning the Right will have an incredible effect on the success of every single sales call that you will make from this day on.”
― Chris Murray, Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction

“Notice we said 'It sounds like . . .' and not 'I'm hearing that . . .' That's because the word 'I' gets people's guard up. When you say 'I,' it says you're more interested in yourself than the other person, and it makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

“From the strain
of binding opposites
comes harmony.

The harmony past knowing sounds
more deeply than the known.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“The key to getting a discount is timing. Always negotiate on price before you pay.”
― Jarod Kintz, Me and memes and memories

“Life is a negotiation. we all want. we all give to get what we want.”
― Mordin Solus

“In negotiations, everyone goes home with a slice of tactful compromise but nobody gets to binge on the whole cake and leave selfish, greedy and unrealistic crumbs for the rest.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Unless all other means have been exhausted, the battle is nothing more than a bar fight taking place in a room that no one should be in.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Know where to draw the line in business transactions. Do not offer to solve the problems you know you cannot solve.”
― Utibe Samuel Mbom, Your Clients and You

“Screaming at trees doesn’t grow berries”
― Anil Kumar, Berries for Greens: Negotiation Basics for Beginners - An Illustrated Story

“Feeling that our demands were moderate, I had assumed that they would be granted with little question; I had believed that the privileged would give up their privileges on request. This experience, however, taught me a lesson. I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“Inside, we found the store deserted, except for a young black man shooting pool by himself at a ragged, ill-lit table. He wore sunglasses, a Simpsons’ T-shirt and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. “You all must be doing that reenact thing,” he said, looking up at us with a bemused grin.

Rob sighed and explained for the fiftieth time what the Civil Wargasm was all about. The man listened patiently, put down his pool stick and said, “I been waiting for somebody like you to answer a question about that War.”

“Fire away,” Rob said.

“Let’s roll the clock back. It’s 1861. You two be first cousins, really. You both white, right? One North, one South, but it’s just a mind thing. Why you got to kill six hundred thousand cousins? Can’t you work it out?”

Rob looked at me. I looked back at him. The man walked to the window and pointed down the road. “I grew up down that way, feeding cattle by Sayler’s Creek,” he said. “Six thousand dudes got hurt or killed, three days before the War be finished. For what?”

As the Gasm’s Union representative, I felt obliged to speak up. “At least some Northerners,” I offered, “thought they were fighting to free the slaves.”

The man lowered his sunglasses and looked me straight in the eye. “You shittin’ me, right? I fought in the Gulf War. Nobody be getting their butt shot off for no freedom thing.” Then he rolled the clock back again. Pointing at Rob, he said to me, “Say your mother’s sister’s son, he’s got slaves. You gonna say to him, ‘Let’s fight over it’? C’mon now, no way. What you really gonna say is this.” He paused for a moment, then continued in a perfect-pitch parody of redneck dialect: “Hey, Billy Joe, whatever you want to do with those niggers is okay by me. Keep ’em in chains, what the fuck. Your momma is my momma’s sister.”

He returned to his normal voice. “It’s a big lie, this slave war thing. It don’t matter really, except that whites today still like to say, ‘Damn, my ancestors died for those niggers, they should be thankful.’ What I seen in the Gulf War, it made me realize war is useless. The main man, Saddam, he still be there. It was politics and greed. Same as in your war. Seems to me y’all could’a worked it out.” With that, he slapped a dollar on the counter, took a lottery ticket from beside the cash register and stalked out the door, leaving us alone in the deserted shop.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Negotiate people, not problems"!”
― Derrick Chevalier, EVOLVE or Be Slaughtered: Negotiation For The 21st Century (UPDATED 2025 EDITION)