This Business of Quotations
“Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses.” (Lord Beaverbrook)
It’s hard for most literary types to get excited about business unless, of course, it is the business of publishing. But timeless observations do, on occasion, come from our captains of industry. The daily grind tends to hone their wit, adding punch to perspective. Which are, after all, the building blocks of good quotations.
I made numerous presentations in my former marketing role and I invariably began each with a quotation. Of course, they were usually from Yogi Berra…but that’s another story.
The lead-in quotation was from Lord Beaverbrook, nee Max Aitken, (1879-1964) who made his fortune in Canada but gained his fame in England as owner of the Daily Express. Historians have called him the first Baron of Fleet Street, his newspapers making him, at the time, one of the most powerful men in Britain. While he could be a generous benefactor, he was also a hard-nosed deal maker, so it was no surprise when he declared, “If you can walk over a man once, you can walk over him as often as you like”.
His old masters line makes a perfect bookend with Andrew Mellon’s more famous “Gentlemen prefer bonds”. At the end of the day, though, Aitken enters The Literarian’s pantheon of quotables for this astute observation: “British electors will not vote for a man who does not wear a hat.”
Being at the centre of the information vortex and having a lofty view of human activity and a not so lofty view of human character, publishers have often put to paper thoughts that were insightful, if somewhat harsh at times.
From Allen Neuharth, founder of USA Today: “Nothing kills hope faster than cynicism.”
From Benjamin Bradlee of The Washington Post: “News is the first rough draft of history.”
From B.C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine and grandfather of Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes Jr., these two gems: “Action without thinking is like shooting without aiming” and “In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina”.
It should be no surprise that the same cleverness that spawned some of the most successful marketing campaigns would also engender some of the more brilliant insights into the human condition.
David Ogilvie, legendary founder of Ogilvie and Mather who raised the bar with his wordy Rolls Royce ads, reminded us that “The consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” His was a half-hearted defence when he wrote in his opus, Confessions of an Advertising Man, that “advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things”. Ogilvie opined that “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”.
More biting was Bruce Barton’s “Conceit is God’s gift to little men”.
Barton (1886-1967) was the most famous advertising man of his day, thanks to his best-selling book The Man Nobody Knows. Published in 1925, the book compared Jesus to a successful businessman.
In 1919 Barton joined with fellow workers from the United War Work campaign (that raised money for soldiers overseas) to form the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne that would become the second largest agency network in the world as BBDO Worldwide. For General Mills, Barton created the character of Betty Crocker, one of the most enduring symbols in American advertising.
Barton’s authored countless magazine articles and newspaper columns focusing on the themes of optimism and success. It was he who penned the famous “when you are through changing, you are through”.
Also from Barton: “It takes a real storm in the average person’s life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.”
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), who established Wanamaker’s department stores and a merchandising and advertising genius in his own right, will forever be remembered and quoted for this quip: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half”.
It goes without saying that the business gurus would have much to say and some of what they said would have staying power. There is no better example than Stephen Covey’s maxim: “Your attitude determines your altitude”. Covey, of course, is the self-help master that brought you The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Which nicely segues into the judgment from Peter F. Drucker, the Father of Modern Management that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.
To close this post, it is probably appropriate to list those quotes that focus squarely on the advantages and evils of capitalism. These are my favourites:
“Under capitalism, man exploits man; under socialism, the reverse is true.”
(Polish proverb according to Leo Rosten)
“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” (Frank Borman, Chairman, Eastern Airlines)
“The quarrel between capitalism and communism is whether to sit upstairs or downstairs in a bus going the wrong way.” (Reverend John Stewart)
Far be it for me to argue.
The Love Triangle Comes Full Circle
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is a good story. It is not a beautifully-written book, but it is a wonderful story. And it is a story with everything.
It is a story with a love triangle. Not just any ordinary love triangle, mind you, but one including a man, a woman and an elephant. Incredibly, the triangle is probably the most normal part of the tale.
It’s also a story about the circus, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, no less. I haven’t read a book about the circus since Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes came out back in ’62. Circuses have always been dark places for me. It is not surprising then that I found Water for Elephants a dark book. It is about the seamier and steamier side of a life not evident under ‘The Big Top’. It takes place during the Great Depression, adding a layer of dreariness and desperation.
It’s a story about being trapped. Jacob Jankowski, in a decrepit body dumped in a claustrophobic nursing home where only memories of his days in the circus provide relief. Marlena, the star of an equestrian act, in a bad marriage to an abusive husband. Rosie the elephant, in a circumstance hardly of her choosing only seconds away from the painful prodding of a bull hook. All three in a world of wonder, excitement, passion and abject cruelty.
Most importantly, it’s a story about escape. Jacob loses everything when his parents are killed in a car accident. He runs away with the circus where his training as a veterinarian would come in most handy. He then has to escape the circus when the darkness begins to close in. Finally, altogether too many years later, he has to escape the straightjacket of his confinement and run back to the only home he ever really knew.
Inevitably, the book, as life, comes full circle. It is the way.
Interesting sidebar on this book and on Sara Gruen, a Canadian born and bred author currently residing in an environmentalist community outside Chicago. Despite the moderate acclaim earned by her first two novels, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, her publisher turned down Water for Elephants. Eventually, she struck a cheap deal with Algonquin. 12 weeks on the N.Y. Times best-seller list and a quarter million dollars later, Gruen was set. Spiegel & Grau paid $5 million for her fourth novel, Ape House and another as-yet-unnamed book.
Eventually, talent, as life, becomes its own reward. It is also the way.
Uncertain About Word-of-the-Year
Last month, the Oxford American Dictionary (Oxford American? How’s that for an oxymoron?) picked the word ‘unfriend’ as the Word-of-the-Year.
According to the dictionary, the verb unfriend means to “remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook”.
This is a most unfortunate word, coming out of the unlovely side of social media. I am not unaware of the networking realities of Facebook and I am not unsympathetic to those not yet friended who are unhappily burdened with being unattached in a vast interconnected world. In that context, unfriending seems particularly unkind and makes friending in the first place an almost capricious exercise. Being thus uncoupled undercuts one’s sense of belonging and underscores the fleeting uncertainty of friendships altogether.
I am unsure of how the dons of the Oxford American Dictionary made their selection. Apparently, part of the appeal of unfriend was the rarity (unusuality?) of an ‘un’-prefixed word assuming a verb sense of friend, i.e., to friend, that is not used. You do not friend, you befriend. As such, says Christine Lindberg, a senior lexicographer with the dictionary, “unfriend has real lex appeal”.
Oh, really?
Among the contenders for the WOTY Award were a number of sniglets, including:
- intexticated - distracted by texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle; and
- freemium - a business model in which some basic services are provided for free with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.
There were the compound words and images, my favourite being ‘tramp stamp’, a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman. My only issue here is that I am sure tramp stamp is already several years old.
I also admit to being impressed by the seemingly endless stream of neologisms Twitter is contributing to the English language, many of which vied for Word-of-the-Year. If you don’t like the words, you at least have to love the chutzpah inherent in twitterati and twitterature. With such pretension, it is no wonder that people become tweetaholics.
In fact, the web contributed disproportionately to the lexicon in 2009. Sad, really, when you consider that the beauty and strength of the English language stem directly from the diversity of its sources.
The WOTY winner must “reflect the ethos of the year” and it must “have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance and use”. Unfriend, begat by the spread of social media, may well reflect the ethos and, indeed, the pathos of 2009. But as to having lasting cultural significance, I would think it most unlikely.
(For more on neologisms, please see: Don’t Snigger at Sniglets and A Case of the Twiggles.)
Alexandria: Of Pharaohs and Philosophers
If you are reading this, odds are you were bedeviled by those horrible deductions in the back of your high school geometry books. That’s the geometry introduced to the world by Euclid of Alexandria in his seminal work, The Elements, way back during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–283 BC).
With its famed Museum and Library, Alexandria was the centre of the world for learning and Euclid was just one of a host of distinguished alumni.
Ptolemy, with his Hellenic philosophical bent and Pharaonic aspirations, saw Alexandria as a nexus for commerce, knowledge and dynastic control. The city was a jewel in its conception, planning and construction. The lighthouse at Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was just one of many architectural marvels. But it was the intellectual capital that made Alexandria so rich and its legacy so enduring.
The Library’s collection was vast, housing virtually all the written works of the age. Its only competition was the Library at Pergamum, said by Plutarch to house some 200,000 volumes. Until, that is, Mark Antony turned over the entire Pergamum collection to the Library at Alexandria as a wedding present to his beloved Cleopatra (last of the Ptolemys).
Among the early librarians was Apollonius, author of the poem Argonautica. That epic tells the story of Jason and the heroes who sailed on the Argo to capture the golden fleece from Colchis. Apollonius’ successor was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, credited with having calculated the Earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes was a close friend of Archimedes who came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study and was a frequent visitor of the Museum.
The first head of the Museum was Ctesibius of Alexandria. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps, earning him the title of “The Father of Pneumatics.” His protégé, Hero of Alexandria, created the first steam engine, predating the industrial revolution by two millennia.
The Museum was also the centre of philosophical discourse. Platonists and neoplatonists, stoics and epicureans all passed through the hallowed halls. Neoplatonism was one of the most influential philosophies of late antiquity and Plotinus’ metaphysical writings in the Enneads inspired centuries of pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Gnostic and mystical thought.
The Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was carried out in Alexandria in stages between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC by Jewish scholars, to whom Philo and Josephus ascribed divine inspiration.
Philo used allegory to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. There are those who believe that his concept of the Logos as God’s “blueprint for the world” formed the basis of Christianity.
No Literarian post would be complete without at least a few quotes and Philo is good for it:
“Those who give hoping to be rewarded with honor are not giving; they are bargaining.”
“Grey hairs are signs of wisdom…if you hold your tongue.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
In short, Alexandria was the mainspring from which philosophical, mathematical, scientific, medical, cosmological and religious thought emanated for centuries. It was a coming together of genius, a place where ideas were exchanged and creative energy flowed freely.
In the end, Julius Caesar, possibly a tsunami, certainly the inevitable ravages of time, conspired to bring destruction to the Museum, the Library and much of the city itself. The record is not as certain as the result. The Library of Alexandria and all its invaluable contents are gone. The legacy, though, will last forever.
To learn more, get yourself a copy of The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind. The authors, Justin Pollard and Howard Reid are noted producers of PBS documentaries. Their intellectual rigor, flare for the dramatic, and accessibility to all audiences are well-honed and shine through in this work.
