Quotes By Frank Luntz

It is acceptable to bring someone to tears if it explains to them in an emotional way why a product, a service, or a candidate is the right person, is the right thing to do.

A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.

The language of America changed with the election of Bill Clinton, because with all due respect to my friends on the Republican side, Bill Clinton is the best communicator of the last 50 years. He felt your pain.

Politics is gut; commercials are gut.

One of the things that you have trouble with politicians, particularly in Washington, is when you get mad at them and you can't touch them; you can't punch them; you can't yell at them.

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.

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 principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different.

If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

There are people still in the Republican Party that I believe practice the communication of anger, of disappointment, of regret, of pain, of sorrow, of suffering. That's not what the American people want to hear.

When I started in this business, everybody said the Democrats were the better communicators because they sounded like social workers, and Republicans were awful because they sounded like morticians. In some cases. they actually dressed like morticians.

The fundamental problem for Republicans when it comes to the environment is that whatever you say is viewed through the prism of suspicion.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

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

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

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.

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.

In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we're actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we're into, provided that it's a healthy pursuit, it's a good thing.

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.

I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.

Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?

The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it.

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.

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.