Top 35 Rory Sutherland Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past. A new campaigning style, a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos.”

— Rory Sutherland

2. “Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.”

— Rory Sutherland

3. “For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.”

— Rory Sutherland

4. “It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.”

— Rory Sutherland

5. “Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made.”

— Rory Sutherland

6. “Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.”

— Rory Sutherland

7. “You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame.”

— Rory Sutherland

8. “Property porn: The unquestioned assumption, widely propagated in countless television programmes, that home improvement is the highest form of self improvement. If we never again see another programme in which some vapid idiots mince around redecorating a house, our lives will have gone up in value by over 30%.”

— Rory Sutherland

9. “And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act:.”

— Rory Sutherland

10. “We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.”

— Rory Sutherland

11. “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”

— Rory Sutherland

12. “A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.”

— Rory Sutherland

13. “I think the first role of marketing is to make a decision easy to make. And that mean firstly clarity in terms of choice, and secondly it means lack of anxiety. So the first role of marketing is not actually getting preference, it’s not actually getting someone to prefer a Philips TV, it’s getting someone non-anxious about buying a Philips.”

— Rory Sutherland

14. “Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5% of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion – it was because nobody liked them.”

— Rory Sutherland

15. “Take the economist ad – “‘I never read the economist’ – Management Trainee aged 42” – it’s a very boring proposition.”

— Rory Sutherland

16. “I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business.”

— Rory Sutherland

17. “The most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people because they’ll always do things and because they’re stupid they’ll do stupid things.”

— Rory Sutherland

18. “If you want to solve the problem, you have to understand ‘the real why’.”

— Rory Sutherland

19. “Andy Warhol about Coke: “The President of the United States can only get the same Coke as the bum in the street.”

— Rory Sutherland

20. “The advice I would give to anybody is to be good at two things, not one, know about two things rather than one, and if possible make the two things overlap a bit.”

— Rory Sutherland

21. “All that property porn, you know, about people buying a flat, doing it up and making thirty grand, it’ll just turn the whole bloody country into a nation of speculators, all the while making property completely unaffordable for anybody under 40. The average age of a first time buyer in the Thatcher era, about ’84, was 25, it’s now 39.”

— Rory Sutherland

22. “As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent.”

— Rory Sutherland

23. “There is an important lesson in evaluating human behaviour: never denigrate a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves.”

— Rory Sutherland

24. “To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need?”

— Rory Sutherland

25. “The number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used.”

— Rory Sutherland

26. “Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works.”

— Rory Sutherland

27. “Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.”

— Rory Sutherland

28. “I call it the Louis XIV test: have a look around your house and imagine what Louis XIV would pay for everything you own. Your house? He wouldn’t keep a horse in it. Your furniture? Complete rubbish. Your car? He’d like your car. But he’d give you half of Burgundy in exchange for the small telly in your bedroom.”

— Rory Sutherland

29. “Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.”

— Rory Sutherland

30. “Many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach.”

— Rory Sutherland

31. “Holidays in far-flung places: In an effort to upstage each other, rich people were obliged to visit increasingly far-flung and dangerous parts of the world on holiday. Machu Picchu is, in truth, a collection of ruined buildings that would be fairly irritating to visit even if you weren’t forced to suffer altitude sickness in order to do it. As Dr Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.”

— Rory Sutherland

32. “People who are not skilled at mathematics tend to view the output of second-rate mathematicians with an high level of credulity, and attach almost mystical significance to their findings. Bad maths is the palmistry of the twenty-first century.”

— Rory Sutherland

33. “I was once booked on a time management course and got the date wrong.”

— Rory Sutherland

34. “Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.”

— Rory Sutherland

35. “Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures.”

— Rory Sutherland

36. “No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner.”

— Rory Sutherland