Quotes About Consumption

We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

The food industry profits from providing poor quality foods with poor nutritional value that people eat a lot of.

No one wants growth, constant expansion, physical swelling. Growth is not a human value; it's a means to the ends of sufficiency and security. Once we have enough, no one wants more, unless it is sold to us as a cheap substitute for something else, something non-material.

Most European countries fund their low corporate taxes with some form of a value-added tax, on consumption rather than income.

When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.

I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.

Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.

Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.

salmonella bacteria, which we contract by eating already infected eggs or meat; the worm responsible for trichinosis, which gets from pigs to us by waiting for us to kill the pig and eat it without proper cooking; and the worm causing anisakiasis, with which sushi-loving Japanese and Americans occasionally infect themselves by consuming raw fish.

For a taste that's a bit more distinct, eat a bird before it's extinct.

Art does not die because there is no more art; it dies because there is too much.

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a 'philosophy' of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.

What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.

If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.

Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation.

The Stockholm Syndrome, the Theatre of Cruelty, voluntary servitude, living coin, the ready made, the accursed share, the total social fact, dust-breeding, the perfect crime - we find all these figures in the reality-TV cocktail, in that potlatch of vacuousness. It even drags the judgement that condemns it into its vacuousness.

If at a given moment, the commodity was its own publicity (there was no other) today publicity has become its own commodity.

For myself, I pick up two stuffed turnovers, which slide down my throat like letters into a mailbox.

A few animals may eat nuts or fruits and others may browse leaves, or even twig tips from a tree, but bark and wood are largely inedible, and grow back slowly once destroyed. The same energy and soil nutrients put into an equal weight of grass will feed many, many more, and the grass will constantly renew itself.

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Come again?' She asked. Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. What if? Has no power against 'what if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you....

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.