#cleverness

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message. ↗

— William Bernbach

#cleverness #clients #instead #job #kill

The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness. ↗

— Arthur Smith

#cleverness #content #day #display #exists

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few. ↗

— Stendhal

#fear #few #founded #many #religions

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit. ↗

— Tom Brown, Jr.

#attack #be patient #because #cleverness #courage

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it. ↗

— Israel Zangwill

#appreciate #clever #cleverness #enough #his

Cleverness is not wisdom. ↗

— Euripides

#cleverness

Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes. ↗

— Leon Kass

#cleverness #far #how #how far #limits

Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#cleverness #myths #people #primitive #humor

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#any #cleverness #decadence #except #incapable

The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness. ↗

— Louis C. K.

#comedy #direction #gone #into #ironic