Top 180 Chris Voss Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Negotiation is the heart of collaboration. It is what makes conflict potentially meaningful and productive for all parties.”

— Chris Voss

102. “Still, I wanted to bring this opportunity to you before I took it to someone else,” I said.”

— Chris Voss

103. “The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation.”

— Chris Voss

104. “Effective negotiators look for pieces of information, often obliquely revealed, that show what is important to their counterpart: Who is their audience? What signifies status and reputation to them? What most worries them? To find this information, one method is to go outside the negotiating table and speak to a third party that knows your counterpart. The most effective method is to gather it from interactions with your counterpart.”

— Chris Voss

105. “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.”

— Chris Voss

106. “They were the economist Amos Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Together, the two launched the field of behavioral economics – and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize – by showing that man is a very irrational beast. Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking.”

— Chris Voss

107. “Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict.”

— Chris Voss

108. “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo.”

— Chris Voss

109. “It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing. Psychotherapy.”

— Chris Voss

110. “Kevin Dutton says in his book Split-Second Persuasion.”

— Chris Voss

111. “We learned that negotiation was coaxing, not overcoming; co-opting, not defeating. Most important, we learned that successful negotiation involved getting your counterpart to do the work for you and suggest your solution himself. It involved giving him the illusion of control while you, in fact, were the one defining the conversation.”

— Chris Voss

112. “I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-ended questions over and over and over and over. They get worn out answering and give me everything I want.” Andy jumped in his seat as if he’d been stung by a bee. “Damn!” he said. “That’s what happened. I had no idea.”

— Chris Voss

113. “Mirroring will make you feel awkward as heck when you first try it. That’s the only hard part about it;.”

— Chris Voss

114. “Mnookin, predictably, started fumbling because the frame of the conversation had shifted from how I’d respond to the threat of my son’s murder to how the professor would deal with the logistical issues involved in getting the money. How he would solve my problems. To every threat and demand he made, I continued to ask how I was supposed to pay him and how was I supposed to know that my son was alive.”

— Chris Voss

115. “Ka-ching! Notice.”

— Chris Voss

116. “Yes,” as I always say, is nothing without “How?”

— Chris Voss

117. “But then I realized I did the same thing with my teenage son, and that after I’d said “No” to him, I often found that I was open to hearing what he had to say. That’s because having protected myself, I could relax and more easily consider the possibilities.”

— Chris Voss

118. “Finding and acting on Black Swans mandates a shift in your mindset.”

— Chris Voss

119. “I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the psychological judo that I’ve made my stock in trade: the calibrated questions, the mirrors, the tools for knocking my counterpart off his game and getting him to bid against himself.”

— Chris Voss

120. “This really juices their self-esteem. Researchers have found that people getting concessions often feel better about the bargaining process than those who are given a single firm, “fair” offer. In fact, they feel better even when they end up paying more – or receiving less – than they otherwise might.”

— Chris Voss

121. “And every time we got the worst possible answer – “You’re right.” He agreed, in theory, but he didn’t own the conclusion.”

— Chris Voss

122. “Let’s pause for a minute here, because there’s one vitally important thing you have to remember when you enter a negotiation armed with your list of calibrated questions. That is, all of this is great, but there’s a rub: without self-control and emotional regulation, it doesn’t work. The very first thing I talk about when I’m training new negotiators is the critical importance of self-control. If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?”

— Chris Voss

123. “A trap into which many fall is to take what other people say literally. I started to see that while people played the game of conversation, it was in the game beneath the game, where few played, that all the leverage lived.”

— Chris Voss

124. “Our techniques were the products of experiential learning; they were developed by agents in the field, negotiating through crisis and sharing stories of what succeeded and what failed. It was an iterative process, not an intellectual one, as we refined the tools we used day after day.”

— Chris Voss

125. “Let me let you in on a secret: people never even notice.”

— Chris Voss

126. “The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations.”

— Chris Voss

127. “Now, think about how my client’s question worked: without accusing them of anything, it pushed the big company to understand her problem and offer the solution she wanted. That in a nutshell is the whole point of open-ended questions that are calibrated for a specific effect.”

— Chris Voss

128. “But neither wants nor needs are where we start; it begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin. We.”

— Chris Voss

129. “No” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it.”

— Chris Voss

130. “Why are they communicating what they are communicating right now?”

— Chris Voss

131. “In a recent study,4 Columbia Business School psychologists found that job applicants who named a range received significantly higher overall salaries than those who offered a number, especially if their range was a “bolstering range,” in which the low number in the range was what they actually wanted.”

— Chris Voss

132. “If you were able to take an armed kidnapper who’d been surrounded by police and hook him up to a cardiac monitor, you’d find that every calibrated question and apology would lower his heart rate just a little bit. And that’s how you get to a dynamic where solutions can be found.”

— Chris Voss

133. “What could they give that would almost get us to do it for free?”

— Chris Voss

134. “In practice, where our irrational perceptions are our reality, loss and gain are slippery notions, and it often doesn’t matter what leverage actually exists against you; what really matters is the leverage they think you have on them.”

— Chris Voss

135. “Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.”

— Chris Voss

136. “I got a lousy proposition for you,” I said, and paused until each asked me to go on. “By the time we get off the phone, you’re going to think I’m a lousy businessman. You’re going to think I can’t budget or plan. You’re going to think Chris Voss is a big talker. His first big project ever out of the FBI, he screws it up completely. He doesn’t know how to run an operation. And he might even have lied to me.”

— Chris Voss

137. “How does this affect the rest of your team? How on board are the people not on this call? What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area?”

— Chris Voss

138. “In two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody,1 UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian created the 7-38-55 rule. That is, only 7 percent of a message is based on the words while 38 percent comes from the tone of voice and 55 percent from the speaker’s body language and face.”

— Chris Voss

139. “It’s a “how” question, and “how” engages because “how” asks for help. Best of all, he doesn’t owe the kidnapper a damn thing. The guy volunteers to put the girlfriend on the phone: he thinks it’s his idea. The guy who just offered to put the girlfriend on the line thinks he’s in control. And the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.”

— Chris Voss

140. “If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?”

— Chris Voss

141. “Playing dumb is a valid negotiating technique, and.”

— Chris Voss

142. “The clear point here is that people operating with incomplete information appear crazy to those who have different information.”

— Chris Voss

143. “To make my point on compromise, let me paint you an example: A woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with his suit. But her husband doesn’t want to; he prefers brown shoes. So what do they do? They compromise, they meet halfway. And, you guessed it, he wears one black and one brown shoe. Is this the best outcome? No! In fact, that’s the worst possible outcome. Either of the two other outcomes – black or brown – would be better than the compromise.”

— Chris Voss

144. “Talking slowly and clearly you convey one idea: I’m in control.”

— Chris Voss

145. “In every negotiation there are between three and five pieces of information that, were they to be uncovered, would change everything. The concept is an absolute game-changer; so much so, I’ve named my company The Black Swan Group. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to recognize the markers that show the Black Swan’s hidden nest, as well as simple tools for employing Black Swans to gain leverage over your counterpart and achieve truly amazing deals.”

— Chris Voss

146. “Too often people find it easier just to stick with what they believe. Using what they’ve heard or their own biases, they often make assumptions about others even before meeting them. They even ignore their own perceptions to make them conform to foregone conclusions. These assumptions muck up our perceptual windows onto the world, showing us an unchanging – often flawed – version of the situation.”

— Chris Voss

147. “People generally fear conflict, so they avoid useful arguments out of fear that the tone will escalate into personal attacks they cannot handle. People in close relationships often avoid making their own interests known and instead compromise across the board to avoid being perceived as greedy or self-interested. They fold, they grow bitter, and they grow apart. We’ve all heard of marriages that ended in divorce and the couple never fought.”

— Chris Voss

148. “I want to emphasize how important it is to maintain a collaborative relationship even when you’re setting boundaries. Your response must always be expressed in the form of strong, yet empathic, limit-setting boundaries – that is, tough love – not as hatred or violence. Anger and other strong emotions can on rare occasions be effective. But only as calculated acts, never a personal attack.”

— Chris Voss

149. “Blunt assertion is actually counterproductive most of the time.”

— Chris Voss

150. “The F-word – “Fair” – is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them.”

— Chris Voss