George Lois

“Whatever the creative industry, when you're confronted with the challenge of coming up with a Big Idea, always work with the most talented, innovative mind available. Hopefully... that's you.”

“Trends can tyrannize; trends are traps. In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive, at least to me, that a new direction is the only direction.”

“When I lecture kids, I say, 'You've got to be ambitious by the advertising' - ambitious. You've got to say, 'See, this product? Maybe I can change the world with this product.' They look at me like I'm nuts, but that's what you can do.”

“Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.”

“If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.”

“The whole area of creativity is constipated and frightened.”

“When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I'll ask the students, 'How many of you have been to a museum this year?' Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.”

“'Mad Men' is nothing more than the fulfillment of every possible stereotype of the early 1960s bundled up nicely to convince consumers that the sort of morally repugnant behavior exhibited by its characters - with one-night-stands and excessive consumption of Cutty Sark and Lucky Strikes - is glamorous and 'vintage.'”

“A graphic designer, you know, who understands ideas and understands that ideas are what makes the world go round, could change the world with a magazine. If one talent could do it right now, and everybody would stop saying it's the death of magazines.”

“I look in the mirror, and I work with the brightest person I know.”

“I talk to all the creative directors today, and they take me aside, and they say, 'You know, it must have been great back in those days when you could do anything you wanted.' I say, 'Huh? Excuse me?' I mean, we fought. In the '60s and '70s, you fought wars with clients, and you have to continue fighting wars to do great work.”

“You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.”

“If somebody says to you, 'MTV,' you think of Mick Jagger on a phone screaming at that phone: 'I want my MTV.' That, to me, was always the epitome of great advertising.”

“The 1960s was a heroic age in the history of the art of communication - the audacious movers and shakers of those times bear no resemblance to the cast of characters in 'Mad Men.'”

“Everybody is so busy talking about 'Twittering' and talking about the new technologies and talking about this and that, but they don't talk about creativity.”

“Because advertising and marketing is an art, the solution to each new problem or challenge should begin with a blank canvas and an open mind, not with the nervous borrowings of other people's mediocrities. That's precisely what 'trends' are - a search for something 'safe' - and why a reliance on them leads to oblivion.”

“From the time I was three or four years old, I drew all the time. Drew all the time, every second.”

“I may have destroyed world culture, but MTV wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for me.”

“Nothing great can come of more than three people in a room. If you had 10 incredibly bright people, nothing would come out of it.”

“When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.”