Quotes from Philip Slater

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.

At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.

Spockian parents feel it's their responsibility to make their child into the most all-around perfect adult possible, and although what this leads to may look like "permissiveness," it's actually more totalitarian, for the child no longer has a private sphere. His entire being has been taken over by parental aspirations. .

Most of us would like to end our lives feeling both that we had a good time and that we left the world a little better than we found it.

Every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

People can bear anything.