Time & Perspective Quote by Leo Burnett

Burnett is doing something clever here: he dresses self-justification up as humility. Calling himself and his peers "hucksters" nods to the long-standing suspicion that advertising is the grease on the machine, not the machine itself. It’s a preemptive concession meant to disarm critics: yes, we sell, we hype, we manipulate. Now let’s talk about what that selling supposedly enables.

The sentence hinges on a chain of causation: mass production creates abundance, mass circulation spreads it, and advertising (the hucksters) supplies the oxygen that keeps that system breathing. Burnett’s intent is to place marketing inside the moral ledger of modernity, not outside it. He’s arguing that the postwar consumer standard of living isn’t just engineered in factories and shipped by rail; it’s narrated into being. People don’t only need products. They need reasons, desire, and the comforting sense that buying is participation in progress.

The subtext is anxiety. Burnett helped build the mid-century ad industry at the moment it was becoming culturally powerful and ethically contested. By punting the verdict to history, he admits the possibility that advertising’s contribution might look, in hindsight, less like fuel and more like fumes. It’s also a savvy rhetorical move: if the judgment is always deferred, the work continues unimpeded.

What makes the line work is its double register: modest on the surface, ambitious underneath. Burnett wants absolution, but he also wants authorship.