Top 70 Robert B. Cialdini Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Every day in every way, I’m getting better. – EMILE COUE.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

2. “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

3. “Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

4. “We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

5. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

6. “When our freedom to have something is limited, the item becomes less available, and we experience an increased desire for it. However, we rarely recognize that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is that we want it. Still, we need to make sense of our desire for the item, so we begin to assign it positive qualities to justify the desire.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

7. “The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

8. “The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

9. “Without question, when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use others’ actions to decide how they themselves should act.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

10. “Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments, but from the generation or promotion of their associations with others of attainment.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

11. “Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

12. “Exodus 23:8–“And thou shalt take no gift; for a gift blindeth them that have sight and perverteth the words of the righteous.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

13. “Just as amino acids can be called the building blocks of life, associations can be called the building blocks of thought.49 In.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

14. “The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

15. “Actually he wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” For some obscure reason, a central distinction had been lost as the years eroded the accurate version of his statement to mean something entirely different and, upon close inspection, entirely silly.44.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

16. “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. – LEONARDO DA VINCI.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

17. “Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

18. “Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?”

— Robert B. Cialdini

19. “The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

20. “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. –Alfred North Whitehead.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

21. “Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest-growing” or “largest-selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough. The.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

22. “In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

23. “They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

24. “Be as precise as possible about your need for aid.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

25. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

26. “First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

27. “One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you’ve got something for which to aim – and that you write it down. There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You’ll be off and running.34.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

28. “Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

29. “The time to react protectively is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

30. “The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

31. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

32. “Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

33. “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

34. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

35. “Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

36. “The researchers thought that recipients of precise offers are much more likely to believe that the person making that offer has invested time and effort preparing for the negotiation and therefore has very good reasons to support the precise offer they are making.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

37. “The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

38. “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

39. “Our ability to create change in others is often and importantly grounded in shared personal relationships, which create a pre-suasive context for assent. It’s a poor trade-off, then, for social influence when we allow present-day forces of separation – distancing societal changes, insulating modern technologies – to take a shared sense of human connection out of our exchanges. The relation gets removed, leaving just the ships, passing at sea.87 UNITY.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

40. “The aim is to get someone to want to buy quickly, without thinking too much about it.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

41. “I can live for two months,” confessed Mark Twain, “on a good compliment.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

42. “Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

43. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

44. “Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

45. “Now, during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by increasing its price substantially.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

46. “What we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

47. “When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

48. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”18.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

49. “But it comes down to this: in deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look for hits rather than misses;.”

— Robert B. Cialdini

50. “The house I got them spotted for looks really great after they’ve first looked at a couple of dumps.”

— Robert B. Cialdini