David Ogilvy

I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.

The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything.

Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

President Obama hasn’t been elected by the American people in order to be pleasant to Russia.

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.

In Downing Street they called me ‘Boss’. Civil servants would always call me ‘Prime Minister’.

I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns… as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.

You in Lebanon, your power is no match to Israel. Israel, militarily, is more powerful than you and maybe it is more powerful than all the Arab countries, or most of them.

The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.

This notion of being “anti-American” is quite an interesting one-it’s actually a totalitarian notion-it isn’t used in free societies…as far as I know, we are the only democratic society where the concept isn’t just ridiculed.

Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the “buying mood”…and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases-the dissemination of a selling message.

But that [‘friendly Fascism’] requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me.

Leave the President’s family business to him. You will have plenty to do without trying to manage the First Family. They are likely to do fine without your help.

I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.