Best 279 quotes in «consumerism quotes» category

[T]here is now a void at the heart of everything. But then there is so much more of everything now!

There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make 30 cents a unit when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus, the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.

The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment…To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty." Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.

The second most dangerous thing about money is that it leaves most of the people who have a lot of it with the unshakable belief that they are intelligent and well informed. The most dangerous thing about it is that it leaves most of the people who do not have a lot of money with the very same belief.

These two trends - the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture - have an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up. I've always taken solace in this dynamic. It means that while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can't fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you've thrown out the packaging for that new pair of sneakers, that latest model iPhone, or whatever the surrogate is. Then you have to find a way to fulfill the void again. It's the perfect formula for endless consumption and perpetual self-commodification through social media, and it's a disaster for the planet, which cannot sustain these levels of consumption. But it's always worth remembering: at the heart of this cycle is that very powerful force - the human longing for community and connection, which simply refuses to die., And that means there is still hope: if we rebuild communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism.

The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism the pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.

The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. The feasts of consumption sustain the economy, keep up the volume in the stock markets, employ the unemployable, excite the fevers of speculation and stimulate the passion for political and sexual novelty.

The standards of beauty in America's über-culture are purposefully set too high so that we will buy anything in our frantic scramble to become attractive. We are meant to feel crushed, inadequate, and less-than so that we'll buy more and more things in the vain hope of "fixing" ourselves.

The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference. (Clodovis Boff, p. 161)

The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don't have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to "natural resources" for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life.

The way Americans tend to buy things: A person who has $20 will buy something for $40 if it’s marked down from $100.

The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.

To ameliorate & raise the standard of the workingmen to the bourgeois level, is perhaps to create a race of slaves content with their lot,-a cast of comfortable Pariahs.

This is the typical fallacy on which all of CONSUMER AMERICA is based. Some piece of useless crap will make people like you.

...those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements

To be or not to be, that is out of the question! I live in the 21st century.

They promise us once-in-a-lifetime bargains in the orgies of consumerism that are Black Friday and Cyber Monday. More likely, we end up with precious little, vacant souls and an ever-decreasing appreciation of humanity.

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

We are more in control of how much we know than we are of how much we have.

Ugh. Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone exhausting themselves, miserably haemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. [...] What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? If gifts and cards were completely eradicated, then Christmas as pagan-style twinkly festival to distract from lengthy winter gloom would be lovely. But if government, religious bodies, parents, tradition, etc. insist on Christmas Gift Tax to ruin everything why not make it that everyone must go out and spend £500 on themselves then distribute the items among their relatives and friends to wrap up and give to them instead of this psychic-failure torment?

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn’t have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained or why it is possessed. Once enough people join in, like with oversized glasses frames or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again. You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions. You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make—those are only details.

We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food. We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering our real powers, that is, our powers of creativity.” We are not passive couch potatoes either. “It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive.” We are also not cogs in a machine. To be so would be to give up our personal freedoms so as to not upset The Machine, whatever that machine is. Creativity keeps us creating the life we wish to live and advancing humanity’s purpose as well.

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else's.

We are no longer indigenous to our environment.

We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way―so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports―so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.

We have a fundamental systemic flaw. We have managed to create scenarios where you can ‘earn’ a living without contributing.

We have too quickly bought into the lie that we’ll be happier with more—and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less.

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children...Where nobody dies...Where all it takes is cheap, easily available product -- a packet of salted peanuts or a new type of carpet cleaner -- to bring immediate, undiluted joy.

We have chosen a problematic name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we're all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way.

We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too.

What use will money and wealth be to those who possess them when the rivers and land are poisoned, the seas devoid of life and the air polluted beyond tolerance?

What we all have to avoid is the notion that we can buy our way out of our problems. Instead, the goal is to reduce our costs by extreme frugality. This is psychologically difficult because if there is one great certain confidence in American society it is this: you can buy your way out of almost anything. Other than a few things that will land you in jail even if you are rich, we tend to look for solutions that involve buying things. Having trouble with your marriage? Take a vacation. Pay a counsellor. Don't want to eat pesticides? Buy organic food! Indebted? Buy a book about how to get out. Worried about Peak Oil? Look at all the things there are to buy. Got a crosscut saw and a year's supply of dry milk yet? Don't want to give up driving and flying? We'll sell you some nice carbon offsets.

What other nations fail to recognize in us--our consumerism--is that we don't simply want to own everything, we want to be everything.

When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple.

When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.

When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the product, and a means of announcing your own identity.

When you buy a product, you don’t just buy the product: you buy everything that company stands for. Sisters, are your things rooted in peace?

When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too.

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.

With the hollowing out of community by the market system, with its loss of structure, articulation, and form, comes the concomitant hollowing out of personality itself. Just as the spiritual and institutional ties that linked human beings together into vibrant social relations are eroded by the mass market, so the sinews that make for subjectivity, character, and self-definition are divested of form and meaning. The isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated as the highest achievement of "modernity" turns out to be the mere husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as an ego was responsible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded and complete community.

When your underwear costs more than your child's education then you are in serious trouble" RjS

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a republic based roughly on the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.

Your brain feels good to look at something at a distance, but the moment you receive it, that's it - in a short while your brain gets used to that specific trigger of possessing that specific object, then it keeps craving for a new trigger - new stimulant, and if you do not give your brain that specific new trigger, your brain will rebel against you, in the same way as an addict's brain rebels against the person.

Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.

With a beaming face celebrate the joyful day and rest not therein. For no one can take away his goods with him. Yea, no one returns again, who has gone hence.

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself.