Adverts Quotes

Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff. ~ Richard Hammond

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. ~ Francis Spufford

I don't want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef. ~ Dylan Moran

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetimes as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life ... Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still. ~ Annie Dillard

In the adverts, I look like I do because 150 people have spent seven hours making me look dazzling. That's not me at all. ~ Keeley Hawes

Acknowledgements!
My thanks to Hollywood
When you showed me John Rambo
Stitching up his arm with no anaesthetic
And giving them "a war they won't believe"
I knew then my calling, the job for me

Thanks also to the recruitment adverts
For showing me soldiers whizzing around on skis
And for sending sergeants to our school
To tell us of the laughs, the great food, the pay
The camaraderie

I am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debt
You paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimage
One year basking in the Garden of Eden
(I haven't quite left yet)

Thanks to Mum and thanks to Dad
Fuck it,
Thanks to every parent
Flushing with pride for their brave young lads
Buying young siblings toy guns and toy tanks
Waiting at the airport
Waving their flags ~ Danny Martin

More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences. ~ Ben Goldacre

There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in? ~ Alan Coren

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters - there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void ... That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window. ~ Jean Baudrillard

When you boil war down or all conflict down to two people, it's a great advert for humanity sometimes. People can find connections with each other, regardless of the bigger picture. ~ John Bradley-West

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I don't think it's a good advert for any restaurant, a fat chef, and secondly, who wants to eat a dessert when the chef's a fat pig. ~ Gordon Ramsay

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. ~ Marshall McLuhan

I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all these years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left. ~ Daisy Johnson

My aunt put my cousins into a children's modelling agency, then my mum did it with us. Me and my sister got a few TV adverts, which was good pocket money. A director saw photos of me and asked me to do a short film. ~ Sullivan Stapleton

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people. ~ James Madison

It's not funny at all that we do all that advertising for children. Why is advertising for children allowed? What possible reason can there be for having those effing adverts on TV for all this crap that's made by poor people in poor countries that we sell our children who have too much? ~ Emma Thompson

A newspaper is an oversized book with adverts and an expiry date. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I've done quite a few adverts. I've also done some presenting and acting work in Spain. I did a lot of Spanish education videos for people wanting to learn English. ~ Christopher Parker

Minus the adverts of TV, the special effects of movies, and the trash of the Internet, live theatre is a personal means to connect with viewers. Lining up eye candy, using graphic words, and teasing or enacting bedroom antics is a lowbrow way to go about it. ~ Tom Jalio

Never mind, love, it's not the end of the world. ~ Simon Barnes

With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts. ~ Athol Fugard

It will be well to advert to the proportion between the objects that will require a federal provision in respect to revenue; and those which will require a state provision. We shall discover that the former are altogether unlimited; and that the latter are circumscribed within very moderate bounds. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats. ~ Stephen Leacock

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. ~ Norman Douglas

Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a Marxist child or an Anarchist child or a Post-modernist child. Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions and our adverts will help to do that. ~ Richard Dawkins

It is now possible to target adverts to the right person at the right time in the right place. But that is not enough. ~ Jerry Della Femina

Money is being wasted on adverts that go right over a consumer's head. They may win awards at Cannes, but they lose at the cash register. ~ Jerry Della Femina

People talk about a moral compass and I think that is it. We always know the right and wrong for ourselves, the north and south. You have to trust it, Anton. People can tell you all kinds of wrong directions, lead you around any corner. You can't trust any of that. You can't even trust me. What do they say in car adverts? About the navigation system? Comes as standard . Everything you need to know about right and wrong is already there. It comes as standard. It's like music. You just have to listen. ~ Matt Haig

The type of adverts to be found on television and in glossy magazines are visually designed to have a power over the mind before they can even be questioned. The dark side of my work, primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind. ~ Mat Collishaw

If I was making a tea advert, I would want to communicate about tea is that it can console you, it can start your day, there is the warmth and the ritual, and you can share it; you make someone a cup of tea and you offer it to them. ~ Matt Smith