June 17th, 2026
What’s Your Best Zinger?
Let me take you back more than two thousand years, to the Greek city of Corinth.
Alexander the Great, the most powerful man alive, the conqueror of the known world, went looking for a famous philosopher named Diogenes. He found him lying in the sun, doing absolutely nothing, owning almost nothing. And Alexander, a man who could have handed him a palace, a fortune, an army, looked down at him and said, “Ask me for anything you want.”
Now picture that. Anything. From the most powerful man on earth.
Diogenes squinted up at him and said, “Stand a little out of my sun.”
That was it. One sentence. He didn’t want gold. He didn’t want power. He wanted the one thing Alexander was actually taking from him, his sunlight. And the story goes that Alexander walked away shaking his head, and told his men, “If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.”
One line. And the most powerful man in the world suddenly saw wealth, and power, and contentment in a way he never had the moment before.
That, my friends, is a zinger.
A zinger is a sentence, maybe two, that makes a person see things differently than they did the breath before you said it. They work in business and in life, at the negotiating table and at the kitchen table. And the funny thing is, the best ones are rarely planned. They leap right out of us, and sometimes we’re as surprised as anyone that we said them.
My wife Teresa, who many of you know is a luxury real estate agent, has one of my favorite zingers of all time.
She was on a listing appointment with a seller who was, let’s say, difficult from the very beginning. He bashed real estate agents. He bashed every agent who had ever represented him. He bashed the market. He talked right over Teresa and would barely let her finish a sentence.
So Teresa stopped him. “That’s enough,” she said. “Your time is up. I wasn’t here to sell you. I was here to save you. But you’re not interested, and I have others who need me.”
Then she gathered her things and walked for the door.
That man came chasing after her. Apologizing. Please come back. Please tell me about your program. He signed that very day, and everything went beautifully from there.
It all turned on two sentences Teresa never saw coming.
“I wasn’t here to sell you. I was here to save you.”
She didn’t plan it. The best ones never are. They simply arrive. And history is full of them.
When Franklin Roosevelt told a frightened nation, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he changed how millions saw the hard road ahead. When Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” he turned hesitation into resolve. And when John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” he gave a nation a sentence it would never forget.
That is the power of a zinger. One line, at the right moment, can change how someone sees everything.
So here’s an invitation. If a memorable line has ever leaped out of you, or out of someone you know, send it my way. If enough of you do, I’ll give your zingers an article all their own, with full credit to the folks who sent them.
What’s your best zinger?
