Quotes About Consumerism

There's something wonderful about taking a tag off a pair of socks, off a shirt, off a jacket. I really think that it has to do with my wanting to give myself all the perks that there are. It's part of my psychosis.

Warhol was questioning the capitalist society.

During the ten years I lived in the U.K., I frequently attended an Anglican church just outside of London. I enjoyed the energetic singing and the thoughtful homilies. And yet, I found it easy to be a pew warmer, a consumer, a back row critic.

The rhino is now more or less extinct, and it's not because of global warming or shrinking habitats. It's because of Beyonce's handbags.

Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.

Americans are gathering the courage to just say no. We are saying no to addictive consumer lifestyles. We are saying no to wars and corporate takeover and the IMF loans that gobble up people and their resources.

I'd like to be more decisive. I can take an hour to choose between two brands of washing powder in the supermarket.

My washing machine overwhelms me with its options and its sophistication.

English women would rather go out and buy a washing machine than shop for clothes.

Krispy Kreme's 'Hot Doughnuts' neon sign blinked but the store was empty. Who would want a hot, incredibly-delicious donut right now? No customers stood in line at Louisiana Fried Chicken either. Spicy food without a Mason's jar of cold lemonade? No thanks. The Liquor Bank's parking lot bustled with activity. Customers were leaving the store with brown bags probably filled with ice-cold beer, 7-Ups and bottled waters.

If we all only owned the things we needed! You don't understand the nature of desire.

The abundance of the children's room must be every parent's or child's worst nightmare. "I'm bored." "I've got nothing to play with"—even though the shelves are full to the brim. Dust-collectors, a useless mess. Where is the love for the teddy bear, the doll, the car? The present which was given in love and did not drown in abundance is hard to find. The child does not need the toys—the toy factories need the child.15

The fact that fashion goes out of fashion and then comes back into fashion based solely on what a few people somewhere think they can sell, well to me, that's insanity.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

The world of the commodity is a world updside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

The great collective illusions, anaemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since given way to the thousands of prepacked ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable brain-scrambling machines. Will

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete.

To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity,

From the spectacular point of view, the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment: the more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So it is decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the point of view of lived reality, all power so attained is paid for by the sacrifice of true self-realization. What is gained on the level of appearances is lost on the level of being and becoming.

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will out sell the other.