Rory Sutherland Quotes

“people don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent,”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“The most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people because they’ll always do things and because they’re stupid they’ll do stupid things.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath)  were the product of “inspired opportunism”. As he once put it: “a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”)”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Footballers, who may earn a few hundred thousand pounds a week, come home to their eager WAGs and a stable full of Bentleys and find the most enjoyable thing they can do is play Grand Theft Auto — something you can buy for £20.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need?”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“The advice I would give to anybody is to be good at two things, not one, know about two things rather than one, and if possible make the two things overlap a bit.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“I was once booked on a time management course and got the date wrong.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5% of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion — it was because nobody liked them.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Andy Warhol about Coke: “The President of the United States can only get the same Coke as the bum in the street”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“As one creative (Chris Wilkins?) remarked to a planner:“You and I both drink from the same well of inspiration. The difference is that you get to piss in it first.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“I think the first role of marketing is to make a decision easy to make. And that mean firstly clarity in terms of choice, and secondly it means lack of anxiety. So the first role of marketing is not actually getting preference, it’s not actually getting someone to prefer a Philips TV, it’s getting someone non-anxious about buying a Philips.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Now, you know. I think there should be a Ministry that just gets rid of shit that’s really annoying, because actually we don’t have that much of a sense of proportion as human beings.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection … goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents … and within a minute or so you’ll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“.”…On the way home, we were getting pissed at Bordeaux airport, and asked each other what could be the greatest gift you could give your children. Moray and I gave some kind of inane account man answer, “Ferrari” I suspect. Paul’s answer was “a sense of wonder.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“How do I know I’m right? Well I once got a room full of lefties to admit through clenched teeth that Karl Marx would have despised the organic movement, but would have loved McDonald’s.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“I call it the Louis XIV test: have a look around your house and imagine what Louis XIV would pay for everything you own. Your house? He wouldn’t keep a horse in it. Your furniture? Complete rubbish. Your car? He’d like your car. But he’d give you half of Burgundy in exchange for the small telly in your bedroom.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Holidays in far-flung places: In an effort to upstage each other, rich people were obliged to visit increasingly far-flung and dangerous parts of the world on holiday. Machu Picchu is, in truth, a collection of ruined buildings that would be fairly irritating to visit even if you weren’t forced to suffer altitude sickness in order to do it. As Dr Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Property porn: The unquestioned assumption, widely propagated in countless television programmes, that home improvement is the highest form of self improvement. If we never again see another programme in which some vapid idiots mince around redecorating a house, our lives will have gone up in value by over 30%”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“All that property porn, you know, about people buying a flat, doing it up and making thirty grand, it’ll just turn the whole bloody country into a nation of speculators, all the while making property completely unaffordable for anybody under 40. The average age of a first time buyer in the Thatcher era, about ‘84, was 25, it’s now 39.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Take the economist ad —“‘I never read the economist’—Management Trainee aged 42”—it’s a very boring proposition.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“You know, at Cambridge I suppose my friends from college would have been a few modern linguists, a couple of historians, four mathematicians, a couple of architects, an anthropologist, etc. You know, a total mix of people who all hung out together. I think that’s hugely beneficial. I think actually that’s the best thing to take from British universities; the rest of the teachings you can take or leave but the college system is really smart, you know, it’s a really, really good idea to bundle people together.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Interestingly, one influence was doing both sides of something—both of which were useful—A-levels: classics and maths. Which is a bloody schizophrenic choice but actually looking back, are the two things I would say that everybody ought to be taught. I think everybody ought to learn a language —not necessarily Latin or Greek, but a language like German which has case endings, which teaches you the rudiments of grammar because the benefit of that is you can then sit down and write an English sentence and know whether or not it’s okay.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man

“Steven Landsburg * called Armchair Economist.”
― Rory Sutherland, Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man