Quotes About Consumption

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

He took a deep breath, as if he were taking the air from my own lungs and swallowing it for himself.

EDIBLE, adj. 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.

Oyster, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails!

ARMY, n. A class of non-producers who defend the nation by devouring everything likely to tempt an enemy to invade.

ALCOHOL, n. (Arabic al kohl, a paint for the eyes.) The essential principle of all.

Men are greedy, aren't they? No gratitude. They don't think about what they've already got from you, only about what they can get next.

You know, we might've fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting the ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren't all bad.

Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

You know, we might've fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren't all bad." "As

Appetizers are the little things you keep eating until you lose your appetite.

All lost, because one of the galaxy's many life forms saw all the others as resources to be consumed. It was an attitude all life began with. Some grew out of it.

The approval trap can be crippling. The craving for approval is insatiable. In fact, the more you feed it, the bigger it becomes. And eventually, it can become all-consuming. The trap is the mistaken belief that more of the same will lead to freedom. However, it turns out that what is needed is a complete reversal of the usual strategies rather than more of the same.

When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.

How do we start to rebuild a society where we don't feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

The question] is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than consumption?

we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a "steady-state economy.

We could work less and buy less. It would prevent the environment—our habitat—from being systematically destroyed. But we don't do it, because we are isolated in our individual cages.

If you put shampoo into a car engine, you're not going to scratch your head when the thing conks out,' [Dale Pinnock] said. Yet every day, all over the Western world, we are putting into our bodies substances 'which are so far removed from what was intended for human fuel.

You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being - TV, radio, reading - it amounted to forty newspapers-worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. (I'd be amazed if it hadn't gone up further since then.) The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

As soon as plants began to be eaten by animals for the first time - way back in prehistory, before the first human took his first steps - the plants evolved chemicals to protect themselves from being devoured and destroyed. But these chemicals could, it soon turned out, produce strange effects. In some cases, instead of poisoning the plant's predators, they - quite by accident- altered their consciousness. This is when the pleasure of getting wasted enters the history.