Quotes About Consumerism

Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon.

America is a country without death. Everything is shiny and new to make you forget such a thing exists.

Joe had long resented how American culture had taught him to want. There were so many things pictured in ads, displayed in store windows: stereo TVs, personality dolls, electronic board games, inboard-outboard motors, personalized bowling balls, graphite baitcasting rods. You were taught to want it all.

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers, buying more bits and pieces—two or more cars, two homes and all that fills them—and outfitting one's body for a wide variety of identities: business person, homebody, amateur athlete, traveler, theater or sports fan. Things exercise a certain tyranny over us.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.

People who say that money can't buy happiness just don't know where to shop.

Even when they proclaimed themselves dupes and victims of consumer culture, women did not renounce makeup, for it had become a common language of self expression and self-understanding.

What every girl should know: Your vagina is disgusting. It smells like the underside of a kangaroo pouch and he doesn't want to touch you because of the grossness. But thankfully, NEW brand douche, perfected by a leading gynecologist, gently cleanses and refreshes, making you feel feminine and special. Because what's more special than a vage filled with vinegar and chemical daisies? Also available in SPICY CINNAMON TACO, for the girl adventurer.

Oh, joy, Christmas Eve. By this time tomorrow, millions of Americans, knee-deep in tinsel and wrapping paper, will utter those heartfelt words: "Is this all I got?"

Let's give our people what they want, which means fast food, cheap television, cars, and Levi jeans.

As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Laura also connects efforts to be a "conscientious consumer" with issues relating to social justice, which also play a big role in the Mennonite Church.

The Amish, it turns out, do something that's both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

Let's begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we've been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.

Adolescence is a marketing tool.

The signs of older times could still be seen on the facades of sealed buildings: Gap, Starbucks, Abercrombie & Fitch - merchants that had sold things people didn't necessarily need but always wanted.

Oh, and by the way, Bed Bath & Beyond: Beyond? Really? Beyond? There is no Beyond! There's Kitchen! Beyond is Kitchen! You're Bed Bath & Kitchen! That's what you are! I don't give a crap if it's not alliterative!

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.

breach between the old society of survival and the consumer society; getting into debt, always regarded as a burden and possibly a disgrace, was suddenly perfectly normal, even encouraged.

David Halberstam describes a young viewer – he may mean himself – who was fascinated by the fact that a child in one such series was 'sent upstairs to his room' as a punishment. At that point he could only dream of living in a house that had an upstairs, let alone a room of his own. But the message of every soap manufacturer, repeated over and over again, was 'tomorrow you too can live like this'.

The ad does not say "Buy this!"; it says, "Be assured that if you buy and display this product, others are being well trained to feel ugly and inferior in your presence, just as you feel ugly and inferior compared with this goddess.

capitalism is not "materialistic," but "semiotic." It concerns mainly the psychological world of signs, symbols, images, and brands