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
"Without promotion, something terrible happens... nothing!"
"Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today."
"I am not ashamed to say that I am a humbug. I have always appealed to the public's love of the marvelous."
"The bigger the show, the bigger the profits."
"The public wants to be humbugged, and I am the man to do it."
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.