Dave Trott Quotes

As Churchill said, “Never let the truth spoil a good story.

There was nothing there except some woods with a lunatic asylum and a graveyard in the middle.

Michael Caine said, ‘It’s like my old dad said, the really rich have got something going that makes them money while they’re asleep.

It’s a classic advertising problem. How do you take something very complicated and reduce it to something very simple, while still retaining the core truth?

As the economist J.M. Keynes said: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones.

The more varied the input, the more unexpected the combinations, the more creative the ideas.

What works is being different. Don’t try to be liked. Find out how you’re different. Then be that. That’s where the power is. That’s what’s new. That’s what’s wanted.

Einstein said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Gentlemen, you’ve just experienced what the public’s impression of British Rail is. Now, if you’ll come this way, we’ll show you exactly how we’re going to turn that around.

Orson Welles summed it up best in The Third Man. ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

We can’t believe the world isn’t exactly the same way for everyone else, as it is for us. But the truth is, you only know what you know.

No TV, no radio, no press ads, no posters. We found one thing that the banks are full of, that could be changed into media. Paper money. We got small printing kits from Ryman and printed: ‘STOP BANKS KILLING CHILDREN. CANCEL THE THIRD WORLD DEBT’ on every bank note we could get hold of.

And that’s a great lesson for all of us. We think everyone’s head is where our head is. If we think everyone’s head is where our head is, we’re just talking to ourselves.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, ‘The problem with the world is that the ignorant are arrogant and cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt.’ Because thinking is more difficult once we realise there is no right or wrong. Just the same thing viewed from different perspectives.