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Quotes About Consumption

It is one thing to put bread and wine away in a store-room, and quite another to eat them. What is eaten is digested and distributed around the body, to become sinews, flesh, bones, blood, a good complexion, sound breathing. What is stored away is ready at hand, to be sure, to be taken out and displayed whenever you wish, but you derive no benefit from it, except that of having the reputation of possessing it. [
~ Epictetus
You can never get enough of what you don't really need.
~ Eric Hoffer
What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand.
~ Eric Schlosser
Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn't viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.
~ Eric Schlosser
The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts.
~ Eric Schlosser
Mann ist was mann isst.
~ Erica Jong
Man's happiness today consists in "having fun." Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones.
~ Erich Fromm
Greed?has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.
~ Erich Fromm
You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything—pictures, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without talking, smoking, reading, drinking, is impossible for most people. They become nervous and fidgety, and must do something with their mouth or their hands.
~ Erich Fromm
What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the social character suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction.
~ Erich Fromm
We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
~ Erich Fromm
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
~ Erich Fromm
Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.
~ Erich Fromm
If humanity continues to consume natural resources irresponsibly and disrupt the balance of nature that provides human life, it will be inevitable that we will encounter the catastrophe of total extinction in less than a hundred years.
~ Erich Fromm
Good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
~ Ambrose Bierce
Edible - good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
~ Ambrose Bierce
All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.
~ Amit Chaudhuri
Supply creates its own demand," the classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say
~ Amity Shlaes
There is no chance for other matter in the stomach of a hungry person.
~ Amos Tutuola
The manufacturing of most goods harms the environment in one way or another. The culprit is not the factory, but it is we who buy what it produces. Therefore we should think carefully about items we purchase.
~ Amy Dacyczyn
I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.
~ Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Farmers in the United States are also permitted to spray the fruit with a synthetic dye called Citrus Red No. 2. The dye is banned in California but may be used by Texas and Florida growers. It is only permitted for fruit that is going to be peeled and eaten or juiced, not for fruit whose rinds will be "processed" into food or drink. Because fruit sold at the grocery store is assumed to be for eating or juicing, it may be sprayed with the dye—and not always labeled as such.
~ Amy Stewart
They are near the bottom of the food chain - a meal for fish and birds - while humans eat from the top of the food chain, consuming an astonishing array of what lies on the planet. But eventually, even we become food for the worms. Shakespeare saw this connection, writing in Hamlet, "A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of a fish that hath fed of that worm.
~ Amy Stewart
If we were being honest, we would admit that what a liquor store sells is, chemically speaking, little more than the litter boxes of millions of domesticated yeast organisms, wrapped up in pretty bottles with fancy price tags.
~ Amy Stewart