Christopher Voss Quotes

You can never in negotiations be totally predictable. The minute you’re predictable, they’re going to figure out how to take advantage.

You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

Thou shalt not ration justice.

If justice is supposed to be fair, than any justice system you would hope is based on fairness.

Business deals are successfully negotiated every day throughout America. The common thread is a mutual desire to reach an accord. And the media business is no different.

I'd like to add that negotiating is not something to be avoided or feared - it's an everyday part of life.

That's what happens in the world. You get offered superior contracts.

We win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.

My aim was to safeguard justice, without doing harm to our war effort.

You just want to be judged against everyone fairly.

Justice in the extreme is often unjust.

The Iranians and Persians are excellent at the art of negotiation.

What is negotiation but the accumulation of small lies leading to advantage?

I'm a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity.

You can't negotiate in public. People won't make concessions in public. They will do that in private. Like sausage making, you have to do it behind closed doors.

You have to listen to adversaries and keep looking for that point beyond which it's against their interests to keep on disagreeing or fighting.

He never wants anything but what's right and fair; only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's everything that he wants and nothing that you want.

By getting your customers to agree with you in small steps along the way, you have a better chance of reaching agreement when it's time to do business.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

Negotiations can create conditions that can lead to solutions.

You shall not be partial in judgment: hear out low and high alike.

We always find that taking a fairly hard-line position means our membership gets the best deal possible.

We cannot negotiate with those who say, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable.

International negotiation has a nasty tendency to remind its practitioners that the laws of gravity affect them, too, and that international life is a two-way street in which one may have to give in order to get.

To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice.