| "Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't." Morris Hite, Adman: Morris Hite's Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988 |
| "There's nothing more dangerous than an idea, when it's the only one you have." Emile Chartier |
| "The advertising man is a liaison between the products of business and the mind of the nation. He must know both before he can serve either." Glenn Frank |
| "The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men -- the man he is and the man he wants to be." William Feather |
| "If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think." David Ogilvy |
| "We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting." Samuel Johnson |
| "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde |
| "When all think alike, no one is thinking very much." Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) |
| "If commerce is the engine of our economy, then advertising is the spark. Responsible advertisers are the drivers who keep us on the right track, leading to a richer, more benevolent society." Brian Philcox, 1991. |
| "We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory." Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain. |
| "Advertising agencies' primary goal is to advertise and sell themselves to the client. Selling the product to the public comes second." Mark Jackson |
| "Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem . . . ultimately to be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of goods, and as a stimulant to social progress." Daniel Starch, The Principles of Advertising, 1923. |
| "Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of the regeneration and redemption of mankind." Calvin Coolidge, 1926. |
| "In our business, except in media buying, there are few economies of scale. Client perception of creative agencies is that the bigger they are, the worse they are." Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP founder and CEO, 2002. |
| "Morale is faith in the man at the top." Albert S. Johnstone |
| "The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced." Daniel J. Boorstin, U.S. historian |
| "The faults of advertising are only those common to all human institutions. If advertising speaks to a thousand in order to influence one, so does the church. And if it encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony. Good times, bad times, there will always be advertising. In good times, people want to advertise; in bad times they have to." Bruce Barton, chairman of BBDO, 1955. |
| "We live in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons." Alfred E.Neumann |
| "But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." Arthur C. Clark (1917- ), British fiction writer. |
| "I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach." David Ogilvy |
| "Advertising practitioners are interpreters. But unlike foreign language interpreters, adpeople must constantly learn new languages. They must understand the language of each new product, and speak the language of each new target audience." Jef I. Richards, advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin, 1995. |
| "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." Carl Jung (1875-1961) |
| "When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either." Leo Burnett |
| "If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!" Jules Henry |
| "It takes good clients to make a good advertising agency. Regardless of how much talent an ad agency may have, it is ineffective without good products and services to advertise." Morris Hite |
| "Yes, I sell people things they don't need. I can't, however, sell them something they don't want. Even with advertising. Even if I were of a mind to." John O'Toole |
| "We find that advertising works the way the grass grows. You can never see it, but every week you have to mow the lawn." Andy Tarshis |
| "The advertising man is a liaison between the products of business and the mind of the nation. He must know both before he can serve either." Glenn Frank |
| "The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among non-conformists, dissenters, and rebels." David Ogilvy |
| "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. (via Brainy Quote)" Oliver Wendell Holmes |
