First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics; and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web; we've realized it's a brochure. ~Douglas Adams


It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive. ~Nicholas Johnson


The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein


Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. ~Marshall McLuhan; introduction to Wilson Bryan Key; Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America; 1974


Don't tell my mother I work in an advertising agency - she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse. ~Jacques Seguela


It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have. ~B. Earl Puckett; quoted in Stephen Donadio; The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations; 1992


So long as there's a jingle in your head; television isn't free. ~Jason Love


You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. ~Norman Douglas; South Wind


Advertising is a bit like playing make-believe. ~Hartman Jule


Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing; but nobody else does. ~Steuart Henderson Britt


It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. ~R. Serling


Promise; large promise; is the soul of an advertisement. ~Samuel Johnson


"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"


Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists; pills; or the bottle. ~Marya Mannes; But Will It Sell?; 1964


As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom; language becomes printed noise. ~George Will; quoted in Stephen Donadio; The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations


In general; my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV. ~Erma Bombeck


Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the equation:? Youth equals popularity; popularity equals success; success equals happiness. ~John Fisher; The Plot to Make You Buy; 1968


When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile; he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view; he is richly rewarded. ~Pat Brown; quoted in David Ogilvy; Ogilvy on Advertising; 1985


Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease. ~Author Unknown


Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. ~Stephen Butler Leacock; quoted in Michael Jackman; Crown's Book of Political Quotations; 1982


If you don't find it in the index; look very carefully through the entire catalogue. ~Sears; Roebuck; and Co. Consumer's Guide; 1897


Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. ~David Ogilvy


What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising?? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. ~Vilhjalmur Stefansson; 1964


Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused; and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick. ~Samuel Johnson


Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. ~George Orwell


I have... had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls. As I unfurl the first scroll; a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out. ~Colin McEnroe


Living in an age of advertisement; we are perpetually disillusioned. ~J.B. Priestley


The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. ~Bill Cosby


Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths. ~Edgar A. Shoaff


"History will see advertising ""as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things; want this; want that.""? ~Malcolm Muggeridge; quoted in Eric Clark; The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising; 1988"


Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it. ~Will Rogers





The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose; but that it has turned to advertising copy. ~Louis Kronenberger


Advertising is only another form of statistics. ~Hartman Jule