ECONOMICS
"Advertising did not invent the products or services which called forth jobs, nor inspire the pioneering courage that built factories and machinery to produce them. What advertising did was to stimulate ambition and desire - the craving to process, which is the strongest incentive to produce. To satisfy this craving the factory was impelled to turn itself into a growing factory; and then, by the pressure of mass demand, into many factories. Mass production made possible mass economies, reflected in declining prices, until the product that began as the luxury of the rich became the possession of every family that was willing to work."
Bruce Barton (1955), chairman of BBDO, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 82.
"To think that the effects of advertising, such a potent environment in any industrialized country, could be limited to economics, is as absurd as assuming that the effects of a hot climate upon a culture could be limited to tropical diseases."
William Kuhns, Waysteps to Eden: Ads and Commercials (1970), New York: Herder and Herder.
"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."
Sinclair Lewis (1943), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 70.
"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."
John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising . . ., 1981, New York: Chelsea House, p. 3.
"Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from preconising [proclaiming] its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are enemies of freedom."
J. Enoch Powell, British Conservative politician, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 19.