Science & Tech Quote by Stephen Leacock

Leacock’s line lands like a polite slap: it flatters advertising with the word “science” only to expose it as a study in momentary mental shutdown. The verb “arresting” does double duty. It suggests both stopping intelligence in its tracks and hauling it away in handcuffs, a wry insinuation that persuasion often works best when reason is temporarily detained. He’s not accusing consumers of being stupid so much as describing a system engineered to exploit attention’s narrow bottleneck: if you can seize the mind for a beat, you can reroute the wallet.

The subtext is an economist’s cynicism dressed as a joke. Markets are supposed to reward informed choice; advertising, in this framing, profits from the opposite condition. Leacock hints at the asymmetry between seller and buyer: one side funds teams to refine stimuli, the other side is trying to live a life while being constantly interrupted. Intelligence isn’t defeated by argument; it’s bypassed by distraction, repetition, and manufactured desire.

Context matters: Leacock wrote in the early mass-advertising era, when newspapers, posters, radio, and department-store culture were turning persuasion into an industry with measurable techniques. Calling it “science” nods to the rising faith in psychology and “efficiency,” then punctures the era’s optimism by revealing the end goal: not enlightenment, not beauty, but extraction. It’s a compact indictment of capitalism’s most modern trick - monetizing attention by treating thought as an obstacle.