A - F

• The ascetic Gotama … avoids watching dancing, singing, music and shows. He abstains from using garlands, perfumes, cosmetics, ornaments and adornments. … He refrains from running errands, from buying and selling.
  • Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1, verse 1.10, p. 69

• Love and admiration are drowned in these astronomical figures.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), E. Bozman, trans. (1939), p. 110

G - L

• In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, … they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind.
  • Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 22

• The sales department isn't the whole company, but the whole company had better be the sales department.
  • Philip Kotler cited in: Michael R. Czinkota (1999), Marketing: Best Practices. p. 11

• The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 57

• 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.
  • Everett Dean Martin, The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), pp. 29-30

M - R

• There is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money.
  • Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

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

Concert hall

And echoes with the sound of salesmen.

• Rush, "The Spirit of Radio"

S - Z