“Many people – and I think I am one of them – are more productive when they’ve had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I’m far better able to write.”

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.

Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.

Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.

Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked. Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.

Don’t drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.

Events of human origin are uncertain, but all is regulated and governed by the incalculable power of God, inspiring us not through drunken fury nor by frantic movement, but through the influences of the stars.

Trees bear fruits only to be eaten by others; the fields grown grains, but they are consumed by the world. Cows give milk, but she doesn’t drink it herself – that is left to others. Clouds send rain only to quench the parched earth. In such giving, there is little space for selfishness.

Note to self: no matter how bad life gets, there’s always beer.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn’t in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn’t in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.