“Oh, my God! She’s growing a trunk! She’s turning into an elephant!”

Butterflies Need No Taxidermist.

“Bobst’s great achievement at Hoffman LaRoche was his advertising campaign for vitamins. It was so successful that he won the nickname of ‘the Vitamin King.’ He made millions of dollars in the stock market, and he decided to leave Hoffman LaRoche for greener pastures. In 1944, he called in Cravath, Swaine and Moore, the lawyers for Kuhn, Loeb Company, to negotiate his terms; they got him a very favorable settlement of $150,000 the first year and $60,000 a year until his seventy-fifth birthday. Having made his fortune in peddling vitamins, he now moved on to the higher-priced pills, becoming head of Warner-Lambert. This firm’s biggest product was Listerine. Gerald Lambert, no mean huckster himself, had built Lambert Pharmacal into a giant empire, principally through his relentless warnings about the perils of ‘bad breath.’ His father had invented a mouthwash, for which he appropriated the most famous name in medicine, Baron Joseph Lister, the inventor of antiseptics and asepsis in hospitals. A prominent surgeon, Baron Lister had operated on Queen Victoria herself, the only time she submitted to the knife. Gerald Lambert made his name a household word with fullpage advertisements for Listerine. Banner headlines warned that ‘Even your best friend won’t tell you.’ Lambert coined a new word for this plague, halitosis, from the Latin for bad breath.”

“Elmer Bobst, who was Lasker’s partner in putting the American Cancer Society over the top, was also a tycoon. Unlike Lasker, Bobst had come from a poor family, but he also had the born huckster’s mentality, taken from that native American entrepreneur, P. T. Barnum, who said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ Bobst joined the drug firm of Hoffman LaRoche in 1911, where his talents as a salesman got him the presidency of the firm. He was also a shrewd businessman; just after World War I, knowing that commodity prices were bound to fall, he was shocked to find that the firm had accumulated huge inventories in the New Jersey warehouse. He quickly closed a deal with Eastman Kodak to buy five tons of bromides, a key ingredient not only of analgesics but also of photographic supplies. He offered the bromides at sixty cents a pound, ten cents below the market price. Within a few weeks, the market price had fallen to sixteen cents a pound.”

“Not only is it, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ it’s also ‘I think, therefore everything else is.’ That’s quantum physics.”

“In the dream content the time of day often represents a certain period of the dreamer’s childhood. Thus, for example, 5:15 a.m. means to one dreamer the age of five years and three months; when he was that age, a younger brother was born.”