Overconsumption Quotes - Page 5

• We are a material-mad race of people. Build, increase, expand, pile up, hoard! More and more and more. "If we can just make enough money to-to- !" Jesus said: "Sell what ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth."

  Eugenia Price

  Jesus, Race, People

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• We are developing new types of destitutes-the automobileless, the yachtless, the Newportcottageless. The subtlest luxuries of today reaches very high in the social scale... The end of it all is vexation of spirit.

  Walter Weyl

  Luxury, Today, Vexation

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• American culture is no longer created by the people... A free, authentic life is no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence. Most North Americans now live designer lives-sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there's more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. We ourselves have been branded.

  Kalle Lasn

  Sleep, Media, Car

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• Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.

  Bono

  Brother, Distance, Unity

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• McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like Harley-Davidson's and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle.

  Benjamin Barber

  Icons, Rocks, Style

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• The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.

  Lesslie Newbigin

  Artist, Order, Enlightenment

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• Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

  Wendell Berry

  Military, Finals, Defeat

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.16, Counterpoint

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• When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame?

  Richard J. Foster

  Running, Simple, Water

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• O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Taken, Class, Luxury

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• The danger, then, is that materialism is not only shaping how we live but the way we think as well. It influences our consumer tastes and our preference for high-paying jobs, but it also alters our capacity to pray, the nature of our prayers, and the ways in which religious tutelage instructs our values.

  Robert Wuthnow

  Religious, Jobs, Prayer

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• It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.

  Vaclav Havel

  Civilization, People, Democracy

  Vaclav Havel, John Keane (2016). “The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe”, p.105, Routledge

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• Everyone should educate themselves in more wise and responsible consumption; promote personal responsibility, along with the social dimension of rural activities, which are based on perennial values, such as hospitality, solidarity, and the sharing of the toil of labor.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Wise, Responsibility, Toil

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• I understand that it's the music that keeps me alive... That's my lifeblood. And to give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses - that's not the American dream. That's the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them - if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself - then you've been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you're not careful, for selling yourself out, or letting the best of yourself slip away.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Dream, Believe, Fall

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• The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

  Ivan Illich

  Technology, Choices, Support

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• What does a man need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade.
  The years thunder by.

  Sterling Hayden

  Lying, Years, Pyramids

  "Wanderer". Book by Sterling Hayden, 1963.

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• We used to say I don't care if I never have any money As long as I have my sweet honey and a shack in the woodland Now we say I don't care if I don't have money, but it's not true We can't live without money, no, because we don't want to We want one of those and two of those, and oh that one looks neat, wrap it up Put it on my MasterCard. Put it on my Visa And I sing it now, hey hey, hey hey, who woulda thunk it Hey hey, hey hey, who woulda thunk it.

  Greg Brown

  Sweet, Two, Long

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• Man today is fascinated by the possibility of buying, more, better, and especially, new things. He is consumption hungry... To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern man, if the dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world.

  Erich Fromm

  Dream, Real, Men

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• In this state of total consumerism-which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves-all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

  Wendell Berry

  Meaningful, Thinking, Ideas

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.85, Counterpoint

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• If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world?

  Bill McKibben

  Offering, Order, Television

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• The goals of development are always and everywhere stated in terms of consumer value packages standardized around the North Atlantic-and therefore always and everywhere imply more privileges for a few... Underdevelopment is the result of a state of mind common to both socialist and capitalist countries. Present development goals are neither desirable nor reasonable. Unfortunately antiimperialism is no antidote.

  Ivan Illich

  Country, Goal, Mind

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• The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Order, Ideas, Income

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2013). “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics”, p.125, Westminster John Knox Press

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• Most persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are right, they have no idea of what is a large and what a small state.... To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled.

  Aristotle

  Animal, Thinking, Order

  Aristotle (2013). “The Essential Aristotle”, p.369, Simon and Schuster

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• We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

  William James

  Fighting, Attachment, Athletic

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.124, Xist Publishing

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• By the same token, frozen dinners, a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and an illegal immigrant hired to clean the house and take one's cat to the vet would have seemed like the epitome of materialism in another time, but now provide the only means available for two-career couples to work hard enough at their jobs to earn the salaries they need to pay for those labor-saving amenities.

  Robert Wuthnow

  Jobs, Couple, Hard Work

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• The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires."

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Powerful, Rights, Self

  FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY (1952). “GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD”

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