Best 279 quotes in «consumerism quotes» category

It is partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.

I think that consumerism is intrinsically a pretty flawed social system.

It is not necessity but abundance which produces greed.

Liberating oneself from the addiction of consumerism and careerism promotes inner peace.

I want a change, and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

No one who had once learned to identify happiness with wealth ever felt that he had wealth enough.

Live your life so that whenever you lose, you are ahead.

Nature is telling us that if you don't respect the environment then you are living with artificial needs and a consumerism that is destroying the very conditions we need to survive.

Nothing is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is dear at a penny.

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Pussy Riot is against the cult of consumerism and the commercialization of art. Our performances were always open for everyone and anyone can see our video clips for free on the Internet.

Put two things together which have never been put together before, and some schmuck will buy it.

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.

The individual serves the planning system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its products.

The next time you go shopping, demand more change.

These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

True happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of external goods.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really

We cannot have a free market since it does not really set us free. It's free for interest, speculation and consumerism to create false needs.

Value change can change our pathetic capitulation to consumerism, which will help us psychologically as well as environmentally.

Small wastebasket liners, $1.17 ... tall wastebasket liners, $2.29 ... garbage can liners, $3.98 ... I think I just spent $7.44 buying something I'm going to throw away.

We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.

We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?

Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough.

we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.

A balanced dieT to make you die with a tea, consists of holding two bags of cookies on each hand and a voracious hunger to consume.

According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.

A broke man’s lover doesn’t feel ‘loved’ on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine’s Day.

A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies.

Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society.

A customer facing crucial decisions: What should I wipe myself with? What should I brush with? His personal hygiene was deteriorating rapidly as he stared at the rows of possibilities, sweating profusely. Would he ever bathe again?

An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.

All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we’re a lawyer, an artist or a police officer.

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Ambition is greed without makeup.

And instead we go to Walmart and buy another piece of shit.

Alberta's two largest cities collected more in library fines than two higher levels of government levied against polluters in 2006-2007.

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

American consumers benefit from disparity & exploitation. I benefit from disparity & exploitation & so does my family. there is no way to be a consumer in this country without causing pain" --casey gray - author of Discount - & my New HERO

And recently, we installed another word in its place which, to their minds, has a wholly positive connotation. We say ‘Gluttony’. They say ‘Consumerism’.

And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.

a perfect description of the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate men are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of man’s slavery to his social system. But in Kierkegaard’s time it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was triviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security: Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs… . Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial…

A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions made by their betters in periodic elections. The "rascal multitude" are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.