Quotes About Consumption

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.

By 1936, 90 percent of all US gasoline was leaded. Domestic consumption of tetraethyl lead reached a high of 5.1 million pounds in 1956. In 1959 the US Public Health Service supported an Ethyl Corporation request to increase the lead content of gasoline from 3 cc to 4 cc per gallon—because refiners had reached a limit in improving fuel through refining and were now losing yield to keep up octane.

Coal-oil production in early 1860 totaled some 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per day, or about 7 million to 9 million gallons per year.22 By comparison, the whale-oil harvest had peaked in 1854 at about 10.3 million gallons and begun a sharp decline.

Wet gas—gas that flowed mixed with petroleum—was routinely vented into the atmosphere or flared off. Gas was often left to vent into the air, sometimes for years, when drillers abandoned dry holes. A 1935 US Federal Trade Commission report to Congress estimated that 20 percent more gas was wasted nationwide between 1919 and 1930 than was consumed:

The volume of water and feed that city horses consumed was matched by their daily output of urine and manure. A working horse produced about a gallon of urine daily and thirty to fifty pounds of manure. That volume filled the New York streets daily with about four million pounds and a hundred thousand gallons of redolent excreta that had to be cleared away. When it wasn't, the streets mired up.

While much of postmodernist analysis should be credited with theoretical imagination, as well as talent for capturing something of the Zeitgeist, this type of analysis nonetheless misses some crucial facts about consumption: that consumption is vitally linked to production; consumption is anchored in concrete relations; and the driving force in consumption is individual interest, as encouraged and often shaped by profit interests.

I noted too that I had on many occasions spoken on the subject of the pollution of the spirit (or so I told them), and how the spirit should not be polluted, and how I personally looked askance at, for instance, a latte.

We swallowed a few bites-not to much scince the food of the gods can burn you to ashes is you overindulge. I guess thats why you don't see many fat gods

Sugary things were restricted; candy was limited, and the only cereals we got were Cheerios, corn flakes, and wholesome hot cereals. Pop (as we called it in Arizona) was out of the question; we drank nothing but milk, water, and juice in our house. Of course, out-and-out junk food like Cheetos and Pop-Tarts was never allowed.

Like fire, the passage of time devoured all things, even a man's life, until it was utterly consumed.

Nobody ate much, but they did drink, which fired their anger and dimmed their judgement.

Well, first murder, then shopping.

There was a difference between art, which you just looked at, and things like soap, which you used. Even if the soap smelled so good that you didn't want to use it, only smell it. This was why people got so pissed off about art. Because you didn't eat it, and you didn't sleep on it, and you couldn't put it up your nose. A lot of people said things like That's not art when whatever they were talking about could clearly not have been anything else, except art.

Women like flames have a destroying power; never to be quenched till they themselves devour.

If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels.

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase By eating, and it fears to starve, unless It still may feed, and all it sees devour; Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.

Television has tremendous power over our lives.

Praying and sinning will never live together in the same heart. Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.

Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.

We are reducing the number of relationships. We are slowly but surely consuming the massive reserves of energy that have been accumulating and are stored in the ecosystems.