| "Advertisements may be evaluated scientifically; they cannot be created scientifically." Leo Bogart |
| "The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas." Linus Pauling |
| "Legalize it, and I will advertise it." Peter Tosh |
| "Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time." Jean Cocteau, New York World-Telegram & Sun, August 21, 1960. |
| "Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production." Sir Winston Churchill, 1874 - 1965. |
| "The business that considers itself immune to the necessity for advertising sooner or later finds itself immune to business." Derby Brown |
| "Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn." William Bernbach, quoted in Bill Bernbach said..., 1989. |
| "The one essential, driving aim of the agency's campaign is not to please and sell you, the public, but to sell the advertiser and get his initialed okay. The public is a poor also-ran." Samm Sinclair Baker, The Permissible Lie: The Inside Truth About Advertising, 1968. |
| "Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images." David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985. |
| "As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world... as in being able to remake ourselves." Mahatma Gandhi |
| "If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising." David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971. |
| "Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special." Fran Lebowitz, US journalist, (1950 - ). |
| "Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow." Bruce Barton, chairman of BBDO, (1955) |
| "A vast sector of modern advertising . . . does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually." Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 1976. |
| "It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath." Aeschylus, 525-426 BC. |
| "The Greatest Sales Strategy in the world: Don't tell me how good you make it; tell me how good it makes me when I use it." Leo Burnett |
| "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." Paul Gauguin, French post-impressionist painter, 1848-1903 |
| "I have learned that you can't have good advertising without a good client, that you can't keep a good client without good advertising, and no client will ever buy better advertising than he understands or has an appetite for." Leo Burnett |
| "To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases." William Kuhns |
| "Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys. And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies. And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones." Joanne Lipman |
| "The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous." Margot Fonteyn - (1919 - 1991) - prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet |
| "No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby." Attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), American journalist and social critic. |
| "Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility." Joseph Conrad, Polish-born novelist and short story writer, 1857-1924. |
| "Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret . . . to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink." Leo Burnett |
| "In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior." Ronald Berman, Advertising and Social Change, 1981. |
| "If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art." Michael Schudson |
| "It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them." Charles C. Colton |
| "Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything." J.M. Coetzee, Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising, 1980. |
| "The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man." Paul Sweezy |
| "When the historian of the Twentieth Century shall have finished his narrative, and comes searching for the subtitle which shall best express the spirit of the period, we think it not at all unlikely that he may select "The Age of Advertising" for the purpose." Printers' Ink, 27 May 1915. |
Submit quote
