Quotes from Daniel Miller

By 'consumer society', I mean one in which commodities are increasingly used to express the core values of that society but also become the principal form through which people come to see, recognise and understand those values.

If you want to know what the English really think about consumption, ignore what they say, but look at what they do.

from the beginnings of history, we have used the critique of consumption to confirm ourselves as essentially good and moral beings. Once upon a more religious time it was common to translate this into an actual asceticism, and I still think it gives us reason to lash out against a consumption we can't seem to control even in ourselves.

Pogosto je tako. Teorija, filozofija, moderna umetnost, ekonomika in druga gibanja, ki uporabljajo obskurne abstrakcije, se lahko zlahka izrodijo v domišljave nebuloze in postajajo kruti peskovniki akademskih div in elit, ki so vajene tako navduševati kakor tudi ustrahovati.

the people of Texas themselves must accept the process as democratic, consistent with existing law, and congruent with their understanding of the principles of self-government.

All of this is to buy the loyalty of the thumb-suckers, whiners, and social experimenters who refuse to produce, refuse to compete, and reject any notion of personal accountability.

Given the nearly unrestricted power of lawmaking and taxation, they ensure that actual dissent is nearly nonexistent. Every citizen has become a federal lawbreaker and we are suffocated under a tax code that few have actually read and no one fully understands. Like the Sword of Damocles, federal retribution hangs over the heads of everyone, waiting to impale anyone who steps out of line.

Social Security recipients, who have been forced to pay into this alleged retirement system, will have their benefits slashed, and those who are currently paying into the system will be forced to face the fact that they have been participating in a Ponzi scheme.

This book is chock full of facts, figures, quotes, poll numbers, laws, and economic data but, to keep the subject matter accessible, it was necessary to streamline the work by omitting additional supporting evidence.

The "United States are" was the clear intention at the founding of the Union, while "United States is" was a later usage adopted to reinforce a fallacy about the construction of the Union.

Treason is a criminal act committed by an individual, not a political body and, therefore, cannot be committed by a State.

The Supreme Court was not and never will be perfect. Some of the most heinous, morally reprehensible, logically flawed decisions have emanated from the Supreme Court. To imbue it with infallibility is to say that, when it upheld slave catching or when it upheld racial segregation, it was right.

The idea was that consumption was a symbolic system we use but we don't understand, in the same way that we speak language clearly without being able to give a lesson in grammar.

The point I am making is that most of that extra consumption you fear will destroy the planet is not actually going to come from what you can claim to be surplus consumption, the hair gel and the jacuzzis. It will come from the provision of basic services that no one can call over-consumption. And we need to confront those, since they are a lot harder to curb.

The people of Texas are tired of living under 180,000 pages of federal laws, administered by 440 separate federal agencies and 2.5 million unelected bureaucrats. The people of Texas are sick of having their lives dictated by politicians they didn't elect forcing policies on them that they don't want.

Texans are no longer comfortable with submitting their political will to a people who, they perceive, wouldn't know liberty and good government if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. There is a precedent for this feeling in Texas. The Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico specifically calls out the other Mexican States for their weakness in the face of Santa Anna's tyranny.

Today I will just observe and listen." • "Today I will trust that everything will work out well." • "Today I will accept things as they are." • "Today I will be aware of the beauty all around me." I recommend affirmations

I suspect the problem comes from the very word 'consumption'. Originally, to consume something means to use it up, in effect to destroy stuff. We think of a fire consuming a house. Two centuries ago consumption was associated with the dread of tuberculosis, a wasting disease.