I am reading this book that I am really enjoying. It's a guidebook and I've been learning a lot about human relations and just the way we think. So many of us, including myself, go about our lives doing what we want, what we think is right, what will satisfy us, what will make us more important, all through our pompous narrow minds, rarely if never stopping to see how it really works. It's all really simple habits, gestures, and wording that can change an unfriendly situation into a friendly one. I found this one to be interesting - never say "you're wrong." If you begin anything by announcing that the person is wrong it automatically challenges them to oppose whatever you're going to say to prove them wrong before you even start. That can make things difficult to get your point across, let alone persuade, when you've instilled a defensive mentality of adverseness in the other person's mind from the very beginning. 

If you are going to prove anything, don't let anybody know it. Do it so subtly, so adroitly, that no one will feel that you are doing it. This was expressed succinctly by Alexander Pope:

Men must be taught as if you taught them not and things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Galileo said:

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.

Lord Chesterfield said to his son:

Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.

Socrates said repeatedly to his followers in Athens:

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

There's magic, positive magic, in such phrases as: "I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts." Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: "I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts."