Top 180 Chris Voss Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “One of the easiest ways to bend your counterpart’s reality to your point of view is by pivoting to nonmonetary terms. After you’ve anchored them high, you can make your offer seem reasonable by offering things that aren’t important to you but could be important to them. Or if their offer is low you could ask for things that matter more to you than them. Since this is sometimes difficult, what we often do is throw out examples to start the brainstorming process.”

— Chris Voss

152. “I really am sorry, but how can I get you any money right now, much less one million dollars, if I don’t even know he’s alive?” It was quite a sight to see such a brilliant man flustered by what must have seemed unsophisticated foolishness. On the contrary, though, my move was anything but foolish. I was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.”

— Chris Voss

153. “As an old Washington Post editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

— Chris Voss

154. “But when someone displays a passion for what we’ve always wanted and conveys a purposeful plan of how to get there, we allow our perceptions of what’s possible to change. We’re all hungry for a map to joy, and when someone is courageous enough to draw it for us, we naturally follow.”

— Chris Voss

155. “If you take a pit bull approach with another pit bull, you generally end up with a messy scene and lots of bruised feelings and resentment.”

— Chris Voss

156. “That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs.”

— Chris Voss

157. “In one brain imaging study, psychology professor Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people are shown photos of faces expressing strong emotion, the brain shows greater activity in the amygdala, the part that generates fear. But when they are asked to label the emotion, the activity moves to the areas that govern rational thinking. In other words, labeling an emotion – applying rational words to a fear – disrupts its raw intensity.”

— Chris Voss

158. “One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.”

— Chris Voss

159. “Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking.”

— Chris Voss

160. “But while we can’t control others’ decisions, we can influence them by inhabiting their world and seeing and hearing exactly what they want.”

— Chris Voss

161. “Human beings the world over are so used to being pursued for the commitment “yes” as a condition to find out more that they have become masters at giving the counterfeit “yes.” That’s what the people facing Joe Businessman are doing, dangling the counterfeit “yes” so they can hear more. Whether you call it “buy-in” or “engagement” or something else, good negotiators know that their job isn’t to put on a great performance but to gently guide their counterpart to discover their goal as his own.”

— Chris Voss

162. “In court, defense lawyers do this properly by mentioning everything their client is accused of, and all the weaknesses of their case, in the opening statement. They call this technique “taking the sting out.”

— Chris Voss

163. “The implication of any well-designed calibrated question is that you want what the other guy wants but you need his intelligence to overcome the problem. This really appeals to very aggressive or egotistical counterparts.”

— Chris Voss

164. “The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world works. Negotiating does not mean browbeating or grinding someone down. It simply means playing the emotional game that human society is set up for.”

— Chris Voss

165. “In any interaction, it pleases us to feel that the other side is listening and acknowledging our situation. Whether you are negotiating a business deal or simply chatting to the person at the supermarket butcher counter, creating an empathetic relationship and encouraging your counterpart to expand on their situation is the basis of healthy human interaction.”

— Chris Voss

166. “In an fMRI brain-scan experiment, researchers at Princeton University found that neural resonance disappears when people communicate poorly. The researchers could predict how well people were communicating by observing how much their brains were aligned. And they discovered that people who paid the most attention – good listeners – could actually anticipate what the speaker was about to say before he said it.”

— Chris Voss

167. “If this book accomplishes only one thing, I hope it gets you over that fear of conflict and encourages you to navigate it with empathy.”

— Chris Voss

168. “When you inflect in an upward way, you invite a response. Why? Because you’ve brought in a measure of uncertainty. You’ve made a statement sound like a question.”

— Chris Voss

169. “Once you’re clear on what your bottom line is, you have to be willing to walk away.”

— Chris Voss

170. “But the moment when we’re most ready to throw our hands up and declare “They’re crazy!” is often the best moment for discovering Black Swans that transform a negotiation. It is when we hear or see something that doesn’t make sense – something “crazy” – that a crucial fork in the road is presented: push forward, even more forcefully, into that which we initially can’t process;.”

— Chris Voss

171. “Among hundreds of such clients, there’s one single, solitary gentleman who gave the question serious consideration and responded affirmatively. Deadlines are often arbitrary, almost always flexible, and hardly ever trigger the consequences we think – or are told – they will.”

— Chris Voss

172. “The other side might not be able to do something because of legal advice, or because of promises already made, or even to avoid setting a precedent.”

— Chris Voss

173. “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.”

— Chris Voss

174. “Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful negotiating technique for transforming encounters from confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.”

— Chris Voss

175. “No” creates safety, security, and the feeling of control.”

— Chris Voss

176. “As long as she stayed cool, they would hear it as a problem to be solved.”

— Chris Voss

177. “That they might help you extract what you want is a bonus; human connection is the first goal.”

— Chris Voss

178. “For a mirror to be effective, you’ve got to let it sit there and do its work. It needs a bit of.”

— Chris Voss

179. “Many of us wear fears upon fears, like layers against the cold, so getting to safety takes time.”

— Chris Voss

180. “Never create an enemy.”

— Chris Voss