Quotes About Excess

A country like America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people.

This extraneous jetsam.

It is important," said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, "to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes"—some of them, he declared, "swollen beyond all healthy limits.

luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose...

The paradox was more likely that an excess of money was the problem—or one of them; that, and a government run by thieves. But I was just learning, and I thought, as one does in such circumstances: Maybe things will improve farther up the road.

We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty, buy what we don't need, and throw away everything that's useful. Don't sell a man what he wants—sell him what he doesn't want. Pretend he's got eight feet and two stomachs and money to burn. That's not illogical—it's evil.

He was practically pushing the hot dogs down his throat.

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice.

Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!

Too much information about nothing.

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

when I came to know Greek art I instantly understood that excess and perfection are enemies; yet on the other hand this world and the millions of worlds around us live by fire ... !

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

Civilization is the art of creating useless needs.

Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

The presence of excessive wealth puts an unnatural spin on the appreciation of art.

Greed is the performance art of the 21st Century.

Unfortunately much of it is frittered away on fast cars, designer clothes and an attitude to pleasure reminiscent of the 18-30 holiday packages.

They feed you, like, eight times a day, which is why cruise people always look like hairless water buffalo wearing sneakers.