Pictorial Best Quotes

The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.

We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil.

The Baldwin strategy was the best way to play the game when nothing was known about which cards had already been played. Their analysis was for a single deck because that was the only version played in Nevada at the time. The Baldwin group also showed that the advice of the reigning gambling experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra 2 percent advantage. Any strategy table for blackjack must tell the player how to act for each case that can arise from the ten possible values of the dealer’s upcard versus each of the fifty-five different pairs of cards that can be dealt to the player. To find the best way for the player to manage his cards in each of these 550 different situations, you need to calculate all the possible ways subsequent cards can be dealt and the payoffs that result. There may be thousands, even millions of ways each hand can play out. Do this for each of the 550 situations and the computations just for the complete deck become enormous. If you are dealt a pair, the strategy table must tell you whether or not to split it. The next decision is whether or not to double down, which is to double your bet and draw exactly one card to the first two cards of a hand. Your final decision is whether to draw more cards or to stop (“stand”). Once I had figured out a winning strategy, I planned to condense these myriad decisions onto tiny pictorial cards, just as I had with the Baldwin strategy. This would allow me to visualize patterns, making it much easier to recall what to do in each of the 550 possible cases.