Bruce Fairchild Barton (1886–1967) was an American author, advertising executive, and politician. He was the most celebrated advertising man of his day, thanks to his best-selling book The Man Nobody Knows (1925.)
Born in Robbins, Tennessee, Barton grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, where his father was the minister of the town’s Congregational church. Rather than following his father’s footsteps into the ministry, when Barton completed his bachelor’s degree at Amherst College, he moved into journalism and then into the emergent advertising industry.
A pioneer of the North American advertising industry, Barton co-founded the Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) Agency in New York. BBDO became known for writing hard-hitting copy and served clients that were among the most important American businesses of the 1920s.
Barton’s bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (1925,) portrayed Christ as an advertising salesman. Barton also wrote many newspaper columns in addition to other books, including The Book Nobody Knows (1926) and What Can a Man Believe? (1927.)
Barton served in the U.S. Congress 1937–40 as a Republican from New York. He survived a sensational blackmail scandal before returning to BBDO in 1940. He remained chairman of the firm until his retirement in 1961.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Bruce Fairchild Barton
The Bible rose to the place it now occupies because it deserved to rise to that place, and not because God sent anybody with a box of tricks to prove its divine authority.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Bible
Great men suffer hours of depression through introspection and self-doubt. That is why they are great. That is why you will find modesty and humility the characteristics of such men.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Depression, Greatness
I made courtiers; I never pretended to make friends, said Napoleon… . On a rocky little island he fretted away the last years of his life—alone.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Friendship
Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things … I am tempted to think … there are no little things.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Business checks up on itself frequently to be sure that it still is headed for its original goals. Is there not need for a similar check-up on the part of the church?
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Success, Achievement, Opportunity
The most important thing about getting somewhere is starting right where we are.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Inaction, Getting Going, Procrastination
If you want to know if your brain is flabby feel of your legs.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Health
It would do the world good if every man in it would compel himself occasionally to be absolutely alone. Most of the world’s progress has come out of such loneliness.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Loneliness, Solitude
For good or ill, your conversation is your advertisement. Every time you open your mouth you let men look into your mind. Do they see it well clothed, neat, businesslike?
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Conversation
The ablest men in all walks of modern life are men of faith. Most of them have much more faith than they themselves realize.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Ability, Faith
Conceit is God’s gift to little men.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Pride, Vanity, Conceit
If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world it will come through the expression of your own personality, that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Personality
Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, may be a good enough motto for men who are on their way to be shot. But from such men expect no empires to be built, no inventions made, no great discoveries brought to light.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Reason
What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Freedom, Habits, Habit
If you expect perfection from people your whole life is a series of disappointments, grumblings and complaints. If, on the contrary, you pitch your expectations low, taking folks as the inefficient creatures which they are, you are frequently surprised by having them perform better than you had hoped.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Realistic Expectations, Perfection
If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Enthusiasm
When you’re through changing, you’re through.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Change
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Explanation, Preparation, Business
Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Advertising
In his first years in the White House, Mr. Roosevelt apologized for each annual deficit. Each new budget message explained that, because of unforeseen circumstances, the promise of the previous year had not been met, but next year things would be better; next year there would be a balanced budget. The 1938 congressional elections were uncomfortably near at hand. it was announced that the President would deliver a Fireside Chat. In it our startled ears caught the opening accents of a grand new liturgy. Spending would be resumed, but let not the heart be troubled. Spending was no longer the rock of unsound finance on which so many liberal governments had been wrecked; it was not danger, but security. Debt, if owed to ourselves, was not debt but investment.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
When a load of bricks, dumped on a corner lot, can arrange themselves into a house; when a handful of springs and screws and wheels, emptied on a desk, can gather themselves into a watch, then and not until then will it seem sensible, to some of us at least, to believe that all these thousands or millions of worlds could have been created, balanced and set to revolving in their separate orbits—all without any directing intelligence at all.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: The Universe, Universe
No sex, age, or condition is above or below the absolute necessity of modesty; but without it one vastly beneath the rank of man.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Humility, Modesty
Many a man who pays rent all his life owns his own home; and many a family has successfully saved for a home only to find itself at last with nothing but a house.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Home
Voltaire spoke of the Bible as a short lived book. He said that within a hundred years it would pass from common use. Not many people read Voltaire today, but his house has been packed with Bibles as a depot of a Bible society.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Bible
As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words ever uttered, “Let there be light,” constitute its charter. All nature is vibrant with its impulse.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Advertising, Nature
When you are through changing, you are through.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Change
Before you give up hope, turn back and read the attacks that were made upon Lincoln.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Hope, Failure
The essential element in personal magnetism is a consuming sincerity—an overwhelming faith in the importance of the work one has to do.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton
Topics: Belief, Sincerity
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