Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
Money is a poor man's credit card.
The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Jokes are grievances.
The real news is bad news.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.