Business can render honest useful service to society without falling into the absurd self-flattery and the blatant charlatanry of its publicity. Its easy ethical attitudes and easy surrender to economic pressures are responsible for the wholesale perversion of a profession such as writing. The advertisement which fails to go into hypocritical rhapsodies about some very ordinary product is uncommon. The advertisement writer who fails to hypnotize himself into seeing or imagining all kinds of exaggerated virtues about a product is uncommon. The advertised description which honestly tells you both what is right and what is wrong with the product is nonexistent. Such publication of the half-lie as if it were the whole truth, of the cheap and sensational or the exaggerated and misrepresentative, is another form of that crude immature culture whose world-spread is so rapid in our time.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 2 : Living in The World > # 129
