Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

Most of the things we buy are wants. And we call them needs, but they're wants.

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.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.

Those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. […] We're used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.

Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives.

Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.

The American conception of advertising is to arouse desires and stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and by constant iteration to send them out to work harder to get the latest model - whether that model be an icebox or a rug or a new home.

There's always going to be merchants who need to get their message out, but things have gone way too far.

The necessities that exist are in general created by the superfluities that are enjoyed.

The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.

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.

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

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.

Business today consists in persuading crowds.

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

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

Buy, buy, buy, buy! They want to grab you and trap you and turn you into little Elizabeth Hurleys.

Everyone is someone else's catalyst for selling something these days.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.

This isn't really a convention, This is really an infomercial. And every night we'll have a different infomercial and people view it with a certain level of cynicism.

We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.