All the Worst Humans Quotes

“I’m paid to disseminate information. I tell the truth from a monetized point of view.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“As CNN broadcasts my message to millions of Americans, I realize my job isn’t to manipulate public opinion. My job is to get gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me. Once you have ink, your story becomes real. A conversation starts that didn’t exist moments before, a conversation nobody would think to have if you hadn’t started it. The public begins to accept something you created out of nothing.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“In the PR business, we try to convert a villain into a vindicator or a victim as fast as possible.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“every story has three parts: a villain, a victim, and a vindicator.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“Going viral” is what every client wants, what they pay PR firms to engineer. Here’s another secret our industry doesn’t want you to know: we have no idea how to do it.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“More jargon equals more bullshit.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“The Nigerian administration wants to talk (and pay) its way out of a problem without acting. Richard Levick likes to say, “You cannot talk your way out of something you acted your way into.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“Then there are the clients who just crave seeing their name in the paper. These people are dangerous. With reckless abandon, these clients will go on the record in a heartbeat, refuse any and all media training, and, most important, likely take advice only from themselves or their trusted spouse. I cannot tell you this with enough emphasis: in a crisis, your spouse is not an objective counselor with regard to your public relations needs. They have a vested interest. They are involved.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“I start to realize that Nigeria might be a Kobayashi Maru. In the Star Trek movie franchise, the Kobayashi Maru was a distressed civilian freighter in a no-win simulation intended to teach fear and humility to new cadets at Starfleet Academy. The simulation had no right answer and would stymie each cadet. Lots of PR clients become their own Kobayashi Maru. Some clients could not get a headline if they owned the newspaper. It’s the client who is convinced they are front-page news who scares me the most. Their expectations are so out of whack with reality that there is no chance you will ever, ever please them. Fire this client immediately.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“Remember, an op-ed is you saying stuff about you. The goal of PR, the brass ring, is to get “earned media,” to get a reporter to say the right thing about you. That way, people actually believe it.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“If Antigua were about to start a trade war with the United States, I ask him hypothetically, would he be interested in an exclusive? Naturally, I have some terms.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“For months, I hold Lindsay off from seeing my apartment. When she walks in for the first time, she clocks the blank walls, the unframed Bloom County posters, the couches draped in sheets to hide the fact that I found them on the sidewalk, the beat-up table, and the empty spaces. The entire place is coated with concrete dust, courtesy of the workers sandblasting bricks outside.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“During media training, PR operatives learn that every story has three parts: a villain, a victim, and a vindicator. In this story, Mary was the victim, and when he murdered the drunk, George became the villain. In the PR business, we try to convert a villain into a vindicator or a victim as fast as possible.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“Influence—wasta in Arabic—means many things to many people, but my life’s work is best encapsulated by the word’s seventeenth-century etymology: “unobservable forces that produce effects by insensible or invisible means.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“It doesn’t matter what the truth is. The facts get changed, the public takes up your narrative, and you watch as the world resumes turning.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“There is always another man behind another curtain.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“And I didn’t make as much money as you’d imagine in the PR machine. It didn’t make me a rich man. But I never did it for the money. I did it for the story.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“You may say: Isn’t that the wrong time? I’d say: it’s when history happens. Lindsay calls me “the Forrest Gump of DC” because I’ve been behind the scenes of so many global events and historical moments you’ve read about in the news.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“The very essence of my job requires that I communicate effectively, yet I struggle to do that in my own mind.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“Dr. Oliver explained that my brain is powered by neural pathways that look like branches of a tree; they are delicate and sophisticated. Decades of mistreated mental illness and PTSD incurred from my job have killed those branches. Ketamine helps regrow them. Without it, depression creates a delta between how I should feel and how I actually feel. If the events of the day make a healthy brain feel nine out of ten on a happiness scale, they make my brain register a two.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“The “tier-two” story runs. If you have been in touch with a reporter for the New York Times in this hypothetical example, they will call you. And they will be apoplectic. Your relationship with this reporter is now over. This is not the most sustainable media strategy.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“I’ve spent my whole life creating narratives. In PR, a good narrative has a beginning, middle, and end. Truly effective narratives become invasive thoughts we plant in the public’s mind.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“It’s not that I’m upset about being fired. Rather, it’s about who fired me. The caliber of the person who fires you matters.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“A ‘Grass Roots’ Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded by Amazon’s Biggest Rivals.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“Be careful he who hunts monsters, lest ye become a monster yourself.” Or whatever Nietzsche said. If you play with fire, there is a better-than-even chance you will get burned.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“The lobbyist orders a bowl of bone marrow soup and a rib eye. “Should we get a bottle of the Super Tuscan?” he asks, testing the waters of my budget with the wine list.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“I float him an invitation to a reception later that week at the Willard Hotel. BLJ is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Muammar Gaddafi’s rise to power. According to DC legend, the term lobbying was coined at the Willard during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. Seems like the appropriate venue for the occasion.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“The best journalists in the world aren’t always breaking stories because of their dogged reporting skills; they’re breaking them because they rely on people like me to feed them exclusive scoops.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“They build their careers, and I do my job to spin a story for a client.”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

“They build their careers, and I do my job to spin”
― Phil Elwood, All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians