Commerce

"What the English call “comfortable” is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it."

"He is like all the rest: a slave to profit, a master only to his bent for negotiating the best deal."

"… actions whose motives he cannot understand—that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit."

"The promise of every product and service is a better life. Profits are the prize for delivering on the promise."

"We may add that focus on maximizing profits is also "not always consistent" with the hope for "the survival of humanity," to borrow the phrase of a leaked memo from , [the U.S.’s] largest bank, warning that "the survival of humanity" is at risk on our current course, including the bank's own investments in fossil fuels. Thus, canceled a profitable sustainable energy project because there’s more profit to be made in destroying life on Earth. ExxonMobil refrained from doing so, because [it] had never opened such a project in the first place, having made more rational calculations of profitability. And rightly so, according to neoliberal doctrine. As Milton Friedman and other neoliberal luminaries have instructed us, the task of corporate managers is to maximize profits. Any deviation from this moral obligation would shatter the foundations of "civilized life.""

"Market signals were clear: There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe."

"The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable."

"There are some sordid minds, formed of slime and filth, to whom interest and gain are what glory and virtue are to superior souls; they feel no other pleasure but to acquire money."

"O proud philanthropist, your hope is vain"

"If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner."

"Private property … has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is."

"In aristocracies, it is not precisely work that is scorned, but work with a view to profit. Work is glorious when ambition or virtue alone makes one undertake it. … The idea of gain remains distinct from that of work. No matter that they are joined in fact. … In democratic societies, these two ideas are, on the contrary, always visibly united."

"Spend time on excellence, and love the right, And don’t let shameful profit master you."

"Whoever has a keen eye for profits, is blind in relation to his craft."

"Cui prodest scelus, is fecit."

"When by habit a man cometh to have a bargaining soul, its wings are cut, so that it can never soar. It bindeth reason an apprentice to gain, and instead of a director, maketh it a drudge."

"For the words of the profits were written on the studio wall"

"Such is the fate of everyone who goes in search of profit; it takes away the life of its owners."

"When a firm makes a profit this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied."

"The love of gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul, when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the man who has it."

"It is no longer economy aiming at individual profit, but economy concerned with collective interest."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be. … A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic … often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based."

"I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered."

"For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his soul?"

"Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic."

"The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. … Together."

"They deny good luck, love, power, romance, and inspiration From La Jac Brite ointment and incense of all kinds, And condemn in writing skin brightening and whitening and whitening of minds.There is upon the federal trade commission a burden of glory So to defend the fact, so to impel The plucking of hope from the hand, honor from the complexion, Sprite from the spell."

"Nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest."

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

"The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf."

"It is impossible to understand the American public without taking into account the tremendous psychological effect of bringing up a generation of people in a daily environment of advertising. It is impossible to escape the advertising man; his sales talk assaults us in the morning newspaper, in the street car, with billboards along the highways, and in his shameless use of the radio. This means that from morning till night, in the midst of our work as in our recreation, we live constantly in an atmosphere of intellectual shoddiness. Every popular prejudice and vulgar conceit is played upon and pandered to in the interests of salesmanship. Everywhere material interests and herd opinion are strengthened to the loss of personal independence. The tendency is to think and speak for effect rather than out of one's inner life. There is a marked decline the ability to play with ideas, or to live the spiritual life for its own sake. Hence a decline in civilization of interest, humor and urbanity. Advertising tends to make mechanized barbarians of us all."

"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."

"She’s the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything for and never really get. She’s the being that takes everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl."

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

"This study was designed to examine the portrayal of women in advertisements in a general interest magazine (i.e., Time) and a women's fashion magazine (i.e., Vogue) over the last 50 years. The coding scheme used for this analysis was based on the one developed by sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1970s, which focuses primarily on the subtle and underlying clues in the picture content of advertisements that contain messages in terms of (stereotypical) gender roles. The results of this study show that, overall, advertisements in Vogue, a magazine geared toward a female audience, depict women more stereotypically than do those in Time, a magazine with the general public as a target audience. In addition, only a slight decrease in the stereotypical depiction of women was found over time, despite the influence of the Women's Movement."

"This study examined whether exposure to TV ads that portray women as sex objects causes increased body dissatisfaction among women and men. Participants were exposed to 15 sexist and 5 nonsexist ads, 20 nonsexist ads, or a no ad control condition. Results revealed that women exposed to sexist ads judged their current body size as larger and revealed a larger discrepancy between their actual and ideal body sizes (preferring a thinner body) than women exposed to the nonsexist or no ad condition. Men exposed to the sexist ads judged their current body size as thinner, revealed a larger discrepancy between their actual and ideal body size (preferring a larger body), and revealed a larger discrepancy between their own ideal body size and their perceptions of others’ male body size preferences (believing that others preferred a larger ideal) than men exposed to the nonsexist or no ad condition. Discussion focuses on the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral consequences of exposure to gender stereotypic television advertising."

"The power of advertising to persuade, manipulate, and shape behavior has long been recognized. Bretl and Cantor (1988) estimated that the average American is exposed to over 37,000 advertisements each year through the medium of television alone. Whereas there has been considerable investigation of gender role portrayals in advertisements, comparatively little empirical attention has been paid to the portrayal of sexuality in advertisements."

"Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising."

"Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you."

"You may be unaware of where your messages are showing up and what content your brand is living next to," said Jon Klein, the former president of CNN who now works in digital media. "It's the nightmare of most responsible marketers."

"For the next few months, I kept noticing ads that demeaned women in popular magazines as well as in The Lancet. “Advertising reinforces the idea that only one kind of beauty is valuable—white, thin, and young. Women of color are often invisible in mainstream advertising or are presented in ways that make them appear exotic, and they are encouraged to conform to white standards of beauty to be considered attractive.” Many of them ended up on my refrigerator. Some of them were outrageous. ("My boyfriend told me he loved me for my mind. I was never so insulted in my life," said a woman with a cigarette.) Many were demeaning, such as the adfor a "feminine hygiene" spray that said, "You don't sleep with teddy bears any more," implying that, although our teddy bears don't mind how we women smell, our boyfriends do. Somewere shockingly violent. I began to notice patterns and categories. I saw that women's bodies were often dismembered in ads-just legs or breasts or torsos were featured. I saw that women were often infantilized and that little girls were sexualized. ("You're a Halston woman from the very beginning," said a shampoo ad, featuring a girl of about five.) I bought a macrolens for my camera and turned the ads into slides. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them. I had begun my life's work."

"Advertising, in fact, is the main storyteller of our society. The right question to ask is not whether this or that ad sells what it is advertising, but what are the consistent stories that advertising tells as a whole about what is important in the world, about how to behave, and about what is good and bad?"

"Research on women in print advertisements has shown that pictures of women's bodies and body parts ("body-isms") appear more often than pictures of men's bodies. Men's faces ("face-isms") are photographed more often than their bodies. This present study is the first to confirm this finding for television commercials. Results showed that men appear twice as often as women in beer commercials. The body-isms of women significantly outnumbered the body-isms of men. Women also appeared in swimwear more often than men, thus increasing the photo opportunities for body-isms. This study raises concerns about the dehuman&ing influence of these images in beer commercials, and their association with alcohol use and the violence in the televised sporting events during which beer commercials are frequently aired."

"The heart is a muscle," Bigend corrects. "You 'know' in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped−up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things."

"Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising in the world."

""We decided to dig deep and pay for television ads we weren't planning to buy because we wanted to make the point that Fox News is out of the mainstream," the movie's director, Marshall Curry, told The Post, adding that he believed the network's rejection of the ad was politically motivated. "It says something that some news channels trust their audience to interpret American history while Fox distrusts its audience and doesn't think it can do that." A spokesman for MSNBC said the company initially rejected the ad because an NBC UNiversal standards group deemed the content too provocative. But the group then gave the filmmakers notes on potential changes that would make the ad acceptable for its airwaves, particularly saying the ad would need context before diving into the Nazi footage. The filmmakers returned with a version that included a title card explaining this was part of an Oscar-nominated film. "We wanted to make sure viewers had full understanding and appropriate context of this ad. And the filmmakers were open to feedback to make a change," the spokesman, Joe Benarroch, told The Post. A CNN spokeswoman did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Asked about the new developments, a Fox News spokeswoman re-sent a statement from earlier in the week by president of ad sales Marianne Gambelli which said the “ad in question is full of disgraceful Nazi imagery regardless of the film’s message and did not meet our guidelines.”"

"Jason Lynch: How has the experience of making Mad Men changed your view of advertising now?"

"Jason Lynch: What did the advertising industry think of the show?"

"Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests."