Consumerism Quotes - Page 15

• Though the worship of riches is an old religion, there has never been a danger that it might become the sole religion. And yet that is what is surely going to happen in the world.

  J. E. Buckrose

  World, Might, Riches

  Annie Edith Foster Jameson, J. E. Buckrose (1923). “What I Have Gathered”

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• America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

  David Foster Wallace

  Country, America, Long

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

  Jeff Bezos

  Leadership, Book, Technology

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• It's about learning your craft. That's a wonderful thing--especially with today's consumerism and instant gratification. You can'tbuy that. It's about making decisions, corrections, choices. I don't think it's so much about becoming a tennis player. It's about becoming a person.

  Billie Jean King

  Player, Thinking, Choices

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• It is a law of nature that everything run by the government will get more expensive and worse over time. Everything run by the private sector will get better and cheaper over time. The fact that [Obamacare] starts this badly does not bode well....We want healthcare run on the same system that gave us cell phones, flat screens, Jerry Garcia chia pets. Everything you submit to the free market...keeps getting better and better.

  Ann Coulter

  Running, Money, Party

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• Jail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don't live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.

  Cecily McMillan

  Money, Wall, Lying

  "Occupy Activist Cecily McMillan Gets 3 Months in Prison: A Rare Interview". Interview with Ashley Codianni, mashable.com. May 19, 2014.

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• 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.

  Yekaterina Samutsevich

  Art, Internet, Cult

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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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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• Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Favors, Argument, Consumption

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• The individual is denuded of everything but appetites, desires, and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit.

  Jeremy Seabrook

  Commitment, Humanity, Desire

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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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• 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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• The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.

  Karl Marx

  Country, Character, Feet

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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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• The sense that materialism has gotten out of hand is magnified by the pressures facing middle-class American families.

  Robert Wuthnow

  Hands, Class, Pressure

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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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• Their property held them in chains...chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled their soul...If they stored up their treasure in heaven, they would not now have an enemy and a thief within their own household...They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.

  Cyprian

  Thinking, Heaven, Soul

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• I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Thinking, Answers, Century

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• 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 can be content with simplicity because the deepest most satisfying delights God gives us through creation are free gifts from nature and from loving relationships with people. After your basic needs are met, accumulated money begins to diminish your capacity for these pleasures rather than increase them. Buying things contributes absolutely nothing to the heart's capacity for joy.

  John Piper

  Heart, Free Gifts, Buying Things

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• I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.

  Martha Beck

  Thinking, Perfect, People

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• Everything is deeply affected by the dominant culture. Consumerism is huge in the US. This is by far the wealthiest [nation], but also the biggest consumer in the world. Which means that a lot of things get used, a lot of things get wasted, and a lot of things get churned out in ways that are wasteful.

  Wangechi Mutu

  Mean, Way, Culture

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• In F-111, I question the collusion between the Vietnam War, income taxes, consumerism, and advertising.

  James Rosen

  War, Vietnam, Income

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• Consumerism has become a new religion, complete with its high priests at Which? and its fatwas against anyone with the temerity to try to sell anything at more than cost price ... It is a depressingly medieval outlook on economic life.

  Sean O'Grady

  Trying, Cost, Medieval

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• Consumerism, what kind of car you have, what kind of house you have in the country and so on, and that is all very incidental when you examine the kind of person he may be. He may be a big bore, and then there is a person who hasn't done a thing in the world and he is a fascinating person.

  Emilio Pucci

  Country, Car, House

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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