Frank Luntz

“Politics is gut; commercials are gut.”

“The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger.”

“We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse.”

“Preserving parks and open spaces is a winner because it doesn't need to be explained to everyday Americans.”

“I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.”

“People like me have to have the discipline only to work for clients, corporations, political people, products, services, networks that we believe in and we want to see succeed.”

“How I say it has as much of an impact on what people think of me as what I say.”

“Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you.”

“So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.”

“There's a lot of money with a lot of big law firms that have a tremendous amount at stake by getting the right language to convince the right jury that my client is either innocent or that the opposition is guilty.”

“The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product.”

“We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.”

“Words can sometimes be used to confuse, but it's up to the practitioners of the study of language to apply them for good and not for evil. It is just like fire; fire can heat your house or burn it down.”

“We decide based on how people look; we decide based on how people sound; we decide based on how people are dressed. We decide based on their passion.”

“There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.”

“The Republican National Committee hired me, and they hired me because they wanted someone who could look members straight in the eye and tell them the truth.”

“Republicans use think tanks to come up with a lot of their messages. The think tanks are the single worst, most undisciplined example of communication I've ever seen.”

“My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.”

“What matters most in politics is personality. It's not issues; it's not image. It's who you are and what you represent.”

“Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.”