Quotes About Consumption

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of fame"—that's philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1851, more than a century and half before social media was invented and made the whole problem ten times worse.

Prosperity has nothing to do with the quantity of money that we have in our pockets, but rather with the quantity of goods that we can buy.

I eat everything but in the right quantity.

I thought eating Double Quarter Pounders with Big Mac sauce wasn't that bad, but I guess it was.

If a third of Americans' time is being spent online, why is only a quarter of ad dollars spent there? It's not proportional.

Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

If you can't buy a hybrid car, your first question should be, 'What is the fuel economy of this car?'

I think that by following the route that I have tried to outline, one gets into a much more interesting and productive series of questions than those that result from saying simply that Chinese don't like milk because they don't like milk.

It's amazing people get so detached from what they eat and what they wear. No one has any contact with how things are made that are put in their body and put in their mouths and I just find it alarming that no one questions it.

We live in a world of instant gratification, the world of the quick fix.

I'm a very fast shopper. I'm very quick; whether it's big money or small money, it really doesn't matter to me. I just get all my things that I need together and get out as quickly as possible.

I love magazines because they're so dispensable, and they're so quickly consumed. In that way, they're quite honest. They're unashamed about how small an amount of time they're trying to keep our attention.

Some argue we should get coal, oil and gas out of the ground as quickly as possible, build more pipelines and make as much money as we can selling it here and abroad. Their priorities are the economy and meeting short-term energy needs so we can live the lives to which we've become accustomed.

When people move from poor countries to America, they quickly adapt in at least one way - their consumption habits.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

Americans love popcorn, and their love doesn't quit.

I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, 'I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.'

It's a lot harder to rack up a big bill on clothes and shoes than on boats and cars.

You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.

Radio is a hungry monster that eats very fast.

Animals that we eat are raised for food in the most economical way possible, and the serious food producers do it in the most humane way possible. I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.

Like most North Americans, I'd been raised on the notion that milk is the first food, and everybody must like it because it's so good and so important for growing up and for being healthy.

Ninety-five percent of the eggs produced in America come from factory-farmed birds. Even if free-range farms were hugely more humane, the sheer number of animals raised to satisfy people's desire for eggs, meat, and milk makes it impossible for us to raise them all on small, free-range farms.