"It is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong."
- Rory Sutherland
"The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say."
- Rory Sutherland
"Once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on."
- Rory Sutherland
"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
"The number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used."
- Rory Sutherland
"What gets mismeasured gets mismanaged."
- Rory Sutherland
"Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made."
- Rory Sutherland
"Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense."
- Rory Sutherland
"In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can."
- Rory Sutherland
"The best ideas do not emerge within disciplines, they emerge at the intersections between them."
- Rory Sutherland
"To reach intelligent answers, you often need to ask really dumb questions."
- Rory Sutherland
"All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal."
- Rory Sutherland
"The circumstances of our lives actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives."
- Rory Sutherland
"Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut."
- Rory Sutherland
"A rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband."
- Rory Sutherland
"A £30 watch will answer your timekeeping needs perfectly — anything else is simply jewellery for men, and mostly of quite spectacular hideousness."
- Rory Sutherland
"If you want to solve the problem, you have to understand ‘the real why’."
- Rory Sutherland
"A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather."
- Rory Sutherland
"A flower is a weed with an advertising budget."
- Rory Sutherland
"The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol."
- Rory Sutherland
"It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors."