Quotes About Consumption

The center [of the supermarket] is for boxed, frozen, processed, made-to-sit-on-your-shelf-for-months food. You have to ask yourself, If this food is designed to sit in a box for month and months, what is it doing inside my body? Nothing good, that´s for sure.

Are you going to eat her here, Mr. Rand, or should I prepare her to go?

Junk is the "ideal product" because the "junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. Tons of makeup—1,484 tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care products—are sold every minute.

climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet

It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite.

According to Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute and codirector of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for about half of all global emissions. That would include the rich in every country in the world, notably in countries like China and India, as well significant parts of the middle classes in North America and Europe.

too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

significant cause of rising emissions is not the reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich.

public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation

The world does not have enough resources and energy to give everyone a life of consumer luxury. We could, though, improve everyone's uality of life in different ways.

Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through ruthless expansion—whether through production for production's sake, in the case of Soviet-era socialism, or consumption for consumption's sake, in the case of consumer capitalism.

Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system's goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive.

We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.

I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly. I wanted to stop my ears and my eyes and my mouth with it.

they keep women consuming their advertisers products in pursuit of the total personal transformation in status that the consumer society offers men in the form of money.

After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.

Slušaju?i ga, palo mi je na pamet da mi u tom trenutku zadovoljstvo može priuštiti samo da zapalim pola svijeta i izgorim s njim.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds

licor es como el matarratas o la generosidad: cuanto más se usa, menos efecto tiene.

Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood. In

Everyone had helped themselves to something with the exception of Fred, who had helped himself to everything.

When the average American says, "I'm starving," it is a prelude to a midnight raid on a well-stocked refrigerator or a sudden trip to the nearest fast food restaurant.

hundreds of butts in piles on the ground to mark the spot, their lives sucked out of them by their users in panicked distressed frenzy, their souls floating around the insides of lungs while their outsides were dropped, stamped on and deserted