“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – Peter F. Drucker

“…no matter how assiduous you are, you can’t turn a bad translation into a good one: You can only make it less bad.” – Robert Gottlieb

“If you use a poor headline, it does not matter how hard you labor over your copy because your copy will not be read.” – John Caples

“Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.” – Noam Chomsky

“If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.” – Ross Perot

“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.” – Al Ries and Jack Trout

“You can’t research a big idea. The only ideas that truly research well are mediocre ideas. In research, great ideas are always suspect.” – George Lois

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” – Elmore Leonard

“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.” – Edward L. Bernays

“Winning can be complicated but there is also a brutally simple side to winning. Napoleon was once asked which armies were the best. He replied, ‘Those which are victorious.’ What more is there to say? We may talk about dozens of metrics but at the end of the day it’s obvious: Win or go home.” – Aldo Papone

“Clarity of language and clarity of thought are inextricably linked.” – George Orwell

“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.” – David Ogilvy

“Broadly speaking, short words are the best, and the old ones when short are best of all.” – Winston Churchill

“A’s hire A’s; B’s hire C’s.” – Donald Rumsfeld

“It’s always important to remember that some people succeed in spite of their methods and not because of them.” – Bill Reddin

“Big ideas win, good ads don’t.” – Jean-Marie Dru

“Everyone talks about the 80:20 rule (that 80% of sales come from 20% of customers). But in almost every category, that bottom 80% you’re meant to ignore are actually responsible for half of a brand’s sales.” – Tom Morton

“You may delay, but time will not.” – Ben Franklin

“Any copywriter who lacks respect for the great mass of people – the working class – has never lived among them. They’re sharp, fast, funny. They have wide-ranging interests. They’re not at all how most middle-class and upper-class people see them. The irony of it is that middle-class and upper-class people are sheltered – often removed from the realities.” – Tim Delaney

“Pay attention to the matter at hand, whether it is an opinion or an act or a word.” – Marcus Aurelius

“Producing high-quality content is core to any marketing process.” – Doug Pepper

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” – Herbert Simon

“I got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.” – Nathan Orbach

“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear...is the most important single line I have ever written.” – Frank Luntz