To explain responsibility to advertising men is like trying to convince an eight-year-old that sexual intercourse is more fun than a chocolate ice cream cone.

Howard Luck Gossage - quoted in The Book of Gossage (1995), Chicago, IL: The Copy Workshop, p. 29

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.

Abraham Lincoln - quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, p. 19.

Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless.

Adolph S. Ochs 1958- quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.

Al Ries and Jack Trout 1986- quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.

The best ad is a good product.

Alan H. Meyer - quoted in Robert I. Fitzhenry, The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations, 1993, Canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, p. 18.

The product that will not sell without advertising will not sell profitably with advertising.

Albert Lasker - head of Lord & Thomas advertising agency (later known as Foote, Cone & Belding).

A good advertising man is a first-class pragmatist. If he has any basic theorem at all, it is that most advertising is an intrusion upon the time and attention of people; a justifiable one but an intrusion nonetheless. The reader has bought the magazine for something other than the ads . . . Therefore the copywriters undertake to stop him in spite of himself.

Albert Lynd - quoted in Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations, 1978, New York: Crown Publishers, p. 15.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement . . . . It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

Aldous Huxley 1923- quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 18.

Liberals don't much like commercial speech because it's commercial; conservatives mistrust it because it's speech.

Alex Kozinski and Stuart Banner - Who's Afraid of Commercial Speech?" 76 Virginia Law Review 627 (1990), p. 652.

It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic.

Alexander Hamilton 1803- founder of the New York Evening Post, quoted in John W. Wright, The Commercial Connection: Advertising & the American Mass Media, 1979, New York: Dell Publishing Co., p. overleaf.

Most fairly successful advertising men like to think that the composition of their copy involves enormous esthetic skills and they have a tendency to excuse the collecting of their exorbitant bribes on the ground that for the first time in history true genius is, at last, finding adequate compensation.

Alexander King - quoted in A. K. Adams, The Home Book of Humorous Quotations, 1969, New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, p. 8.

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