Quotes About Consumption

Now it's all about the word of mouth, and watching a series on Netflix. That's the way people actually consume this stuff now, instead of waiting for a DVD release you're not really sure you want to buy. And I think it's fantastic, because then I can watch the shows that I missed, over a weekend. I love doing that.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

In a company, you buy thousands of things. Every item you buy has its own footprint.

As we consume more than ever, climate change is accelerating as well. In fact, we know that 2014 was the hottest year in human history. These pressures combine to create real threats to security and stability around the world.

You always assume for some strange reason that you need three meals a day.

This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.

Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty.

As we settle into 2013, I predict this: We'll see companies that promote this shift from private ownership thrive. More people will be able to access things they simply don't need to own, and they'll save money and live better, cleaner, green lives doing it.

Technology loves and thrives and makes gobs of money on conspicuous consumption.

After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

Balance the federal budget now, not 15 years from now, not 20 years from now, but now. And throw out the entire federal tax system, replace it with a fair tax, a consumption tax, that by all measurements is just that. It's fair.

My kids download 10 games. They play them all for two minutes. They throw away the eight they don't like. Then they play those last two obsessively for a month. That's alien to those of us who buy a $60 game and play it for 40 or 50 hours. The discovery mechanism is completely social, and I don't think you get that genie back in the bottle.

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

You can't solve climate change by everybody individually buying a more efficient car and throwing out less stuff. You have to make national changes through national policy.

Because of social media being such a marketable format, things are constantly being released, so people don't pay as much attention because they have a million things being thrown at them. You reach more people, but now there's more content. Before, it was harder to get the people but there was less content.

Frankly, with HBO and Showtime and cable shows, the DVD box sets and all, you can have a product that doesn't make you feel like as soon as it's projected, it's thrown away. It's really a piece of art.

About 30% of fresh food is thrown away in supermarkets every day, although they will deny it. British households are throwing an estimated 30% of their food away, too.

In every area, we seem to have thrown everything away and embraced reality television. It's nauseating, programme after programme.

Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year.

An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.

Our generation is the most cinematically saturated of all time. Videotapes, DVD's, streaming... Spielberg... all of it has thrust us into an endless loop of consumption.

It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth.