“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.”

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.

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.

Don’t drink in the hotel bar, that’s where I do my drinking.

They say some of my stars drink whiskey, but I have found that ones who drink milkshakes don’t win many ball games.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

I try to work out my mind more these days. I try to eat right. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I take the skin off chicken. But I’m not on no special diet. I like my steak and potatoes, ice cream, doughnuts.

We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it’s not OK to take drugs?

My mother never cursed at home; my father never cursed at home. My father didn’t drink. Even though we were poor, we would say a blessing over the table. So that’s who I am.

There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.

People are saying that I’m an alcoholic, and that’s not true, because I only drink when I work, and I’m a workaholic.