“Walking around downtown SF, past giant Internet companies with thousands of employees, at some level you have to acknowledge that the things that really work just don’t have to try as hard as things that don’t. Or to put it even more simply: The best-designed stuff doesn’t tell you some high-minded story; it just gets out of the way, and lets you tell your own damn story.”

“The essential difficulty of the problem of evil is how to reconcile its apparent existence with a loving, all-powerful deity. One popular method has been to reassert the inherent justice of the world, implying, if not explicitly claiming, the righteousness of the suffering that we witness throughout it. The result is, essentially, a theological form of victim-blaming.”

“What a good lawyer does is tell a story that persuades. Not by hiding the truth or exciting the emotion , but using reason, through a story, to persuade.

When it works, it does something to the people who experience this persuasion. Some, for the first time in their lives, see power constrained by reason. Not by votes, not by wealth, not by who someone knows — but by an argument that persuades. This is the magic of our system, however rare the miracles may be.”

“Nix shows how psychographically categorized voters can be differently addressed, based on the example of gun rights, the 2nd Amendment: “For a highly neurotic and conscientious audience the threat of a burglary—and the insurance policy of a gun.“ An image on the left shows the hand of an intruder smashing a window. The right side shows a man and a child standing in a field at sunset, both holding guns, clearly shooting ducks: “Conversely, for a closed and agreeable audience. People who care about tradition, and habits, and family.””

“The corporate tax comes, I think, from fundamental misconceptions. The first is that corporations are somehow like people, who when taxed bear some burden. No, corporations are just shells or buckets of money, people pouring money in or taking it out bear the entire burden.”