“Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.”

Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.

What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.

Leaders grasp nettles.

The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.

Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest.

It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

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.

Art – when it is really doing what it should do – teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

They that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company.

A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.