Overconsumption Quotes - Page 6

• All the wants which disturb human life, which make us uneasy to ourselves, quarrelsome with others, and unthankful to God, which weary us in vain labors and foolish anxieties, which carry us from project to project, from place to place in a poor pursuit of we don't know what, are the wants which neither God, nor nature, nor reason hath subjected us to, but are solely infused into us by pride, envy, ambition, and covetousness.

  William Law

  Ambition, Pride, Envy

  William Law, P. G. Stanwood (1978). “A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life ; The Spirit of Love”, p.153, Paulist Press

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• We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

  T. S. Eliot

  Organization, Humanity, Progress

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Christianity and Culture”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Too many commercials. Too many lies. Too many celebrities. I don't recognize. Too many brand names. Too many magazines. I got so much sensation, I can't feel a thing. Simple. Living. Got to get to simple - living. Simple living. Simple... simply living.

  Fred Small

  Lying, Simple, Light

  "Environmental Songs". Interview with Steve Curwood, www.planetpatriot.net. April 18, 1997.

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• We did not choose to believe that personal choice is the highest human virtue. Rather, we were taught, formed, forced to believe nothing is important in life other than that which we have personally chosen. The irony is that the belief that nothing is important in life other than that which we have personally chosen is a belief that we have not personally chosen! The supermarket and shopping mall have been our school.

  William Henry Willimon

  Believe, School, Shopping

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

  Mark Twain

  Consumerism, Supreme

  Mark Twain (1992). “Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, Volume 1: 1852-1890”, p.711, Library of America

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• We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.

  Bill McKibben

  Art, Taken, Sadness

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• We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  War, Years, Oil

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.33, Faber & Faber

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• We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

  Neil Postman

  Children, Objectivity, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.61, Vintage

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• The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter.

  Lewis Mumford

  Men, Long, Expansion

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• He who accepts his poverty unhurt I'd say is rich although he lacked a shirt. But truly poor are they who whine and fret and covet what they cannot hope to get.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Poverty, Rich, Shirts

  Geoffrey Chaucer (1966). “The Canterbury Tales”

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• Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'

  C. S. Lewis

  World, Misery, Cold

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• The illusion that consumption - and its correlative, income - is desirable probably stems from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Knights, Together, Events

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• The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television.

  Thomas Merton

  Children, Character, Reality

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• Heaven help a timid child in a trendy tide He really doesn't know That his heart's being taken for a ride Doing what the world lays down As a steadfast rule And changing when the world says to change Like a steadfast fool Heaven, heaven help me I'm one of the dominoes Chain reaction coming Blow by blow

  Mark Heard

  Children, Taken, Heart

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• A sense of self has to be sought in the parade of images and products; and this culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs, and purpose, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests, and politics alike.

  Jeremy Seabrook

  Teacher, Self, Community

  Jeremy Seabrook (1978). “What Went Wrong?: Why Hasn't Having More Made People Happier?”, Pantheon

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• Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.

  George Perkins Marsh

  Science, Men, Long

  George Perkins Marsh (1864). “Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action”, p.35, New York : C. Scribner

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• 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.

  Peter Maurin

  Want, Radical Change, Giver

  Peter Maurin (2010). “Easy Essays”, p.63, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• If we do not bear the cross of the Master, we will have to bear the cross of the world, with all its earthly goods. Which cross have you taken up? Pause and consider.

  Sadhu Sundar Singh

  Taken, World, Bears

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• Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Wise, Money, Men

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• [Capitalism is] that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Answers, Demand, Want

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• It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Asking, Advertising, Rich

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• The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

  Raoul Vaneigem

  Mean, Organization, Everyday

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• Under private property, each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.

  Karl Marx

  Selfish, Power, Men

  Karl Marx (2012). “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Air, Space, Long

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• Democracy encourages a taste for physical gratification; this taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in its turn, hurries them on with mad impatience to these same delights; such is the fatal circle within which democratic nations are driven round. It were well that they should see the danger and hold back.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Believe, Men, Circles

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2015). “Democracy in America - Vol. I. and II.”, p.599, Read Books Ltd

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