"...three important characteristics influencing global growth: the extent of competition domestically [...] the quality of a country's institutions that make an economy work; and the success of its policy makers..."

- Chapter 12. The Universals of Economic Growth

"Whether you're banded together to meet a deadline, to fight a competitor, or just to beat the team down the hall, a challenging rival can be a great motivator. And a little competition can make a big difference."

- Chapter 3. To be a Good Boss

"Search is the new interface for commerce and marketing."

"Fate never played a stranger prank than when she transformed this shy young Oxford graduate from a studious archaeologist into the leader of a hundred thrilling raids, creator of kings, commander of an army, and world's champion train-wrecker."

- Chapter XI

"The product of smart mob technologies is cooperation, not horsepower or mind power. Intellectual technologies like mathematics and graphic user interfaces augment the capabilities of cognition. The power of mobile and pervasive communications derives from the ways people can use them to organize social groups in new ways."
- Chapter 2: Technologies of Cooperation

"All schedules [...] serve three primary purposes. The first is to make commitments about when things will be done. The schedule provides a form of contract between every person on a team or in an organization [...] The second purpose of a schedule is to encourage everyone who's contributing to a project to see her efforts as part of a whole [...] The third purpose of schedules is to give the team a tool to track progress and to break work into manageable chunks."
- Chapter 2. The Truth About Schedules

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings."

"Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy"

"But we are entering the era of infinite shelf space. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics – the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution – are trending to zero in Long Tail markets of digital goods, where bits can be copied and transmitted at almost no cost at all."

"Creating buzz sounds very tough. But it can be easy if you know which buttons to push. Time and time again, these six things push people's buttons and start conversations: The taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humour), The unusual, The outrageous, The hilarious, The remarkable, The secrets (both kept and revealed). Push any of these buzz buttons, and you'll give people the currency to start a conversation."

- Chapter 3. The First Secret - Push the Six Buttons of Buzz

"Most companies in expert services - such as lawyers, doctors, and accountants - think that their clients are buying expertise. But most prospects for these complex services cannot evaluate expertise; [...] But they can tell if the relationship is good and if phone calls are returned. Clients are experts at knowing if they feel valued. [...] If you're selling a service, you're selling a relationship."

- Chapter 3. Marketing is Not a Department

"A word of mouth topic is not your official marketing message or your formal brand statement. It's a simple message that sparks interest and conversation. Great word of mouth topics are often hard for traditional marketers to see. They violate the rules of marketing. [...] It's an exception when real people want to repeat your official company motto or carefully crafted theme. Instead, people latch onto the unexpected."

- Chapter 5. Topics: What Will They Talk About?

"Create like a God. Command Like a King. Work Like a Slave."

"...and to lounge in the warm darkness while conversation grew up, seemingly from no roots at all, and blossomed and flowered exotically, under the magic brilliance of the stars until with a reluctance of which they were hardly conscious they drifted off to bed, hours after midnight."

- The Happy Return

From the Amazon.com Editorial Review: "Are you a gambling, divorce-prone, conspicuously consuming "Income-Statement Affluent" Jacuzzi fool soon to be parted from his or her money? or a frugal, loyal, resole-your-shoes and buy-your-own-groceries type like one of Stanley's "Balance-Sheet Affluent" millionaires?"

"Can an intelligence create another intelligence more intelligent than itself? Are we more intelligent than the evolutionary process that created us? In turn, will the intelligence that we are creating come to exceed that of its creator?"

- Chapter 2. The Intelligence of Evolution

"Now again I cannot answer questions, but at this moment there is no need because I go where my legs will take me and if I look ahead, it seems like time gone by, for I see myself no matter where I go, forever here."

- Chapter 25

"Growing business and economic links will ensure that relationships among the NAFTA countries endure and grow more intense as time goes by. [...] While there is much that each country can do on its own to secure a prosperous future for the region as a whole, growing interdependence makes it essential that they move forward together."

- Chapter 6. Three's Company: NAFTA as a Bloc