P.T. Barnum — "The public likes to be astonished, and it likes to be amused."
The public likes to be astonished, and it likes to be amused.
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More from P.T. Barnum
"The bigger the humbug, the better the people will like it."
"The public is more easily humbugged than ever before, because it is so anxious to be humbugged."
"A little reflection will show that humbug is an astonishingly wide-spread phenomenon — in fact almost universal."
"Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public."
"Without publicity a terrible thing happens: nothing."
About P.T. Barnum (1810-1891)
American showman and Barnum & Bailey Circus co-founder, whose autobiography popularized Gilded Age commercial spectacle. Closely associated with James Anthony Bailey (his circus business partner). For an intellectual contrast, see Mark Twain, American author and Gilded Age satirist — Twain's The Gilded Age (1873, with Charles Dudley Warner) named the entire era of corrupt commercial spectacle Barnum embodied — Twain's later writing repeatedly attacked Barnum-style hucksterism as the era's moral disease.