Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

People don't rise from nothing.

If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.

...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.