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We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
-- Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-48), wife of US novelist, F Scott Fitzgerald
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
-- Ogden Nash (1902-70), English poet
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
-- Norman Douglas, Scottish-born novelist and essayist (1868-1952), in: South Wind
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don't know which half.
-- William Hesketh, Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), British industrialist, who founded Lever Brothers
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.
-- David Ogilvy (1911- ), American advertising executive, in: Confessions of an Advertising Man
It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
-- JK Galbraith (1908- ), US economist, in: American Capitalism
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
-- George F Will (1941- ), US essayist, in: The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
-- George Orwell (1903-50), attributed
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