William Dean Howells Quotes

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

Philosophically, I don't like doing commercials.

Advertising moves people toward goods; merchandising moves goods toward people.

There is no way for the American economic system to function without advertising. There is no other way to communicate enough information about enough products to enough people with enough speed.

Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions.

Magazines and advertising are flogging the idea that you have to keep changing things and get something new. I think that's balls - evil. But obviously that's your livelihood.

The Tube is a vehicle for selling things, not for exploring ideas.

I long for the day when advertising will become a business for a grown man.

Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force - an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.

Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem... ultimately to be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of goods, and as a stimulant to social progress.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

When you think about advertisements, it makes sense that they want to hold and retain our attention.

The public don't know what they want; it's my job to tell them.

Advertising is a wonderful lubricant for business, if it's used properly.

Everything is designed to help you sell out.

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

In the early 19th century, they tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. They tried selling it as sexy, and everyone bought it.

Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

In New York, I live on a compost heap of all the stuff I accumulate.

I grew up in a country where advertising doesn't exist.