“In business, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.” – Chester L. Karass
“It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.” – Ivan Goncharov
“The one sure way to conciliate a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.” – Konrad Adenauer
“Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.” – Lance Morrow
“Negotiating means getting the best of your opponent.” – Marvin Gaye
“My father said: ‘You must never try to make all the money that’s in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won’t have many deals.’” – J. Paul Getty
“If you are planning on doing business with someone again, don’t be too tough in the negotiations. If you’re going to skin a cat, don’t keep it as a house cat.” – Marvin S. Levin
“When a man says that he approves something in principal, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it in practice.” – Otto Von Bismarck
“The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table and deny the aggressor theirs.” – Richard M. Nixon
“We were not born to sue, but to command.” – William Shakespeare
“One day Donald Trump will discover that he is owned by the Lutheran Brotherhood and must renegotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who don’t understand why anyone would pay more than $120 for a suit.” – Garrison Keillor
“Start out with an ideal and end up with a deal.” – Karl Albrecht
“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun that you can with a kind word alone.” – Al Capone
“Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.” – Albert Einstein
“If you can’t go around it, over it, or through it, you had better negotiate with it.” – Ashleigh Brilliant
“Here’s the rule for bargains: ‘Do other men, for they would do you.’ That’s the true business precept.” – Charles Dickens
“Most people I ask little from. I try to give them much and expect nothing in return, and I do very well in the bargain.” – François Fénelon
“It’s just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Bargaining is a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues; the difference between the two being that the first is practiced on the Continent, the latter in Great Britain.” – George Mikes
“Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” – Harold Macmillan
“If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it or that you tried to bargain over the price.” – Rudyard Kipling
“I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.” – Winston Churchill
“Ever negotiate with lawyers at a huge company? If they saw you drowning 100 feet from the shore, they’d throw you a 51-foot rope and say they went more than halfway.” – Paul Somerson
“In a negotiation, he who cares less wins.” – Unknown
“Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.” – Honore de Balzac
“The first principle of contract negotiation is don’t remind them of what you did in the past; tell them what you’re going to do in the future.” – Stan Musial
“Firmness in support of fundamentals, with flexibility in tactics and methods, is the key to any hope of progress in negotiation.” – Dwight Eisenhower
“Who makes a timid request invites denial.” – Seneca
“It is easy to know when a government wishes for peace by observing the character of the person sent to negotiate for it.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
