Consumer Culture Quotes

• I'm part of the consumer culture... I'm just using the space I am given to express something that is out of the space so I'm part of the consumer system but I'm advocating stepping out. Which is a contradiction but I could be part of he consumer system and say, 'let's consume even more.'

  Michel Gondry

  Space, Culture, Contradiction

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• In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

  Ivan Illich

  Two, Envy, Addiction

  Tools for Conviviality ch. 3 (1973)

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• Consumer culture is contradiction in terms

  Tibor Kalman

  Culture, Contradiction, Term

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• We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

  Jeff Bezos

  Success, Jobs, Business

  "Online Extra: Jeff Bezos on Word-of-Mouth Power". Interview with Robert D. Hof, www.bloomberg.com. August 2, 2004.

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• Maybe we don’t recognize satisfaction because it is disguised as radical generosity, a strange misnomer in a consumer culture.

  Jen Hatmaker

  Generosity, Culture, Satisfaction

  Jen Hatmaker (2012). “7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess”, p.94, B&H Publishing Group

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• America is a consumer culture, and when we change what we buy - and how we buy it - we'll change who we are.

  Faith Popcorn

  America, United States, Popcorn

  Faith Popcorn (1991). “The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life”, p.13, BookBaby

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• I'm caught up probably just as much in the consumer culture as the next person.

  Michael Moore

  Culture, Next, Caught

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• If the Christ we follow sent out his disciples with no extra possessions (Luke 9:1-6 and 10:1-12) and warned would-be devotees that he had nowhere to lay his head (see Luke 9:57-62), then we must recognize that it is extremely difficult to live in a Christian way in a consumer culture.

  Marva Dawn

  Christian, Would Be, Culture

  Marva J. Dawn (1999). “A Royal Waste of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World”, p.88, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.

  James Hollis

  Black And White, Journey, Today

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• In the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies, and a huge battle is being waged. These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may "progress" at their cost.

  Arundhati Roy

  Fighting, Land, People

  "Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'". Interview with Arun Gupta, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

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• We need to deal with three things that are important: first, we need a very deep reconsideration of how we are dealing with the economy. Second, there must be a very deep reconsideration of our way of life. We cannot simply adopt American-style consumer culture. To Islamize that is to de-Islamize Islam.Thirdly, it is important for us to understand the economy and the environment are common challenges for everyone. This is where the singularity of Islamic principles needs to join the universal values that we share with others.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Islamic, Challenges, Style

  Source: dinmerican.wordpress.com

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• Daft Punk and I belong to the Generation 75. We were born in 1975, so we are somewhat in the middle of the rebellion and freedom of the 70s and the consumer culture of the 80s.

  Pedro Winter

  Generations, Culture, Rebellion

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• We get off track. Capitalism takes us off track. You get off the "real" and get on the "wheel." The "wheel" becomes the winning and losing, the succeeding and failing, the "I will achieve." All that stuff becomes so preoccupying, particularly if you're born with low self-esteem, or no sense of yourself, or even if you're just born in the consumer culture. It's very powerful.

  Eve Ensler

  Powerful, Real, Self Esteem

  "The Big Idea: Eve Ensler". Interview with Suzanne Koven, therumpus.net. June 12, 2013.

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• In the consumer culture of marriage, commitments last as long as the other person is meeting our needs. We still believe in commitment, because we know that committed relationships are good for us, but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage. Most baby boomers and their offspring carry in our heads the internalized voice of the consumer culture-to encourage us to stop working so hard or to get out of a marriage that is not meeting our current emotional needs.

  William J Doherty

  Baby, Powerful, Believe

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• What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

  Philip Yancey

  Media, Space, Church

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• To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

  Kathleen Norris

  Humility, Exercise, Self

  Kathleen Norris (1997). “The Cloister Walk”, p.25, Penguin

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• I'm part of the consumer culture. I was part of the baby boom generation. I have a car when I shouldn't, a couple of computers; I can't be anti-consumerist in that sense.

  John Elkington

  Baby, Couple, Car

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions.

  John Seabrook

  Friday, 4th Of July, People

  "Ask the Author Live: John Seabrook on Crowds". live chat, www.newyorker.com. January 28, 2011.

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• I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.

  Douglas Coupland

  Crazy, Dark, Pigs

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• Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  War, Years, Class

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

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• As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.

  Steven Pressfield

  Artist, Uprising, Skulls

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.32, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Reflection, Wish, Culture

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• There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e.g., social conservatives) of today want family values, less government, and maintain the traditions of society (at least in America's case). However, we must face the cultural contradiction of capitalism: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumer culture, undermines the values which render capitalism possible

  Slavoj Žižek

  Government, America, Political

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• The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. The General Strike attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

  Justin Sane

  Reality, Issues, Iphone

  "Anti-Flag’s General Strike Is a Soundtrack for Occupied America" by Scott Thill, www.wired.com. March 29, 2012.

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