Consumerism Quotes - Page 7

• Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Garden, Clothes

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.212, Cosimo, Inc.

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• For me what was amazing was consumerism of people survived after Katrina. You see in a yard that the SUV is gone but they left the Ferrari or the more expensive car because it just wasn't practical. They couldn't get all their stuff in it. So you see this beautiful car totally destroyed; motorcycles. You walk into these houses - we were with the New Orleans police when they would go into the houses - we'd go through these houses and we were just amazed at how much stuff that had been accumulated and how much was left behind.

  Stanley Greene

  Beautiful, Car, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

  Henry Giroux

  Ignorance, Past, Political

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Thieves, Goods

  Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.76, New Directions Publishing

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• To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.

  George MacDonald

  Power, Contentment, Want

  George MacDonald (1884). “Donal Grant”, p.3, CCEL

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• With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning America into a prison house of the spirit. The affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways into the most affluent slum on earth.

  Eric Sevareid

  Cities, America, House

  Eric Sevareid (1964). “This is Eric Sevareid”

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• Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination -- the usefulness of toys -- and strictly celebrates consumerism.

  Armond White

  Names, Imagination, Stories

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• The great danger in today's world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor.

  Pope Francis

  Heart, World, Today

  Pope Francis (2015). “The Spirit of St Francis: Inspiring Words on Faith, Love and Creation”, p.92, SPCK

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• I don't mean to criticize anyone in any way that I wouldn't criticize myself. I think people should have fun, and have a good time, and enjoy the luck that we have to be lazy and dwell in consumerism. But I think that it's a balance. And our job as actors is empathy.

  Natalie Portman

  Jobs, Fun, Mean

  "Inside the Actor's Studio". Interview with James Lipton, New School University, November 21, 2004.

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• In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

  Jimmy Carter

  Strong, Hard Work, Self

  Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence, delivered 15 July, 1979

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• We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Technology, People, Development

  "Planet Savers : 301 Extraordinary Environmentalists". Book by Kevin Desmond, 2008.

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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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• 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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• 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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• What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.

  Thomas Sowell

  Tunes, Want, Might

  Thomas Sowell (2010). “Basic Economics 4th Ed: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy”, p.201, Basic Books

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• Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

  Henry Rollins

  America, Revealing, Indicators

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• I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?

  Wendell Berry

  Dream, Thinking, People

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

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• Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

  Paul Krugman

  Silly, Character, Mean

  "Confronting the Malefactors". www.nytimes.com. October 6, 2011.

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

  Plutarch

  Doe, Needs, Pennies

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• Gentrification and consumerism... have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen.

  Tom Hayden

  Beach, Character, Venice

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• Only the rich can achieve enlightenment because the poor are too busy looking for fridge freezers.

  Rajneesh

  Enlightenment, Busy, Rich

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

  George Carlin

  Two, Together, Schmucks

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• 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.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Saving, Individual, Consuming

  "The New Industrial State".

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