Quotes About Consumerism

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe...Turn on the TV...What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.

Of all the great empires the world has known, ours will be the shortest. Two hundred years of chasing the Godalmighty Dollar, and what do we produce? The A-Bomb and I Love Lucy.

We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it.

And I shuddered at the apparent freedom so many women felt simply to take what they wanted without regard for other women's feelings. It was as though we were all crazed customers at some kind of year-end shoe sale, shoving our fellow females out of the way as we clutched desperately at the few remaining pieces of merchandise. I had the discouraging sense that our culture had created female monsters, dooming us to play out these intense and bitter rivalries almost against our will.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

Sexual creativity is a mystery that will never be solved by commercialism.

Haven't you heard? Money doesn't buy happiness. Just really nice cars.

I was trying to create products to complement the pop-up blocker. All these people were giving me their credit cards. I figured I could sell them something else.

Magazines and advertising are flogging the idea that you have to keep changing things and get something new. I think that's balls - evil. But obviously that's your livelihood.

I think 'Candy Crush' may be fading in popularity, but there's always something new that's popping up.

We tend to always want to obtain something new and something more, and we never really enjoy what we have.

If New York has just become a mall for the world, then what's the difference between being here and somewhere else?

When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman - a rage, everyone had to have one. Well, you don't hear about the Walkman anymore.

As a believer in the free market, the sooner you have people with a job - the better chance they have a job, the sooner they are employed - the sooner they become consumers. And the sooner they become consumers, the sooner they become deciders about their own health care decisions.

Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hippy sensibility to bear. Buyers saw the brand as saying 'all-natural, organic and Fairtrade.'

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

To me, a 'brand' sounds evil.

I use Amazon for books. I use Amazon for loads of other things. I regard Amazon as a source, as I think a lot of other people do.

Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself.

People buy personalities as much as merchandise, and it is a question if they are not influenced more by the personalities with which they come in contact than they are by the merchandise.

Getting rich results in his seeing flaws in the goods and services he buys.

These impulses to buy new things that will eventually lose their novelty

Walk around Tokyo and all you see are people trying to sell you something. Tell them okay and before you know you have bought something. Make the mistake of telling your address and now you're on a mailing list. Some old guy pats you on the shoulder and before you know what hit you you're in a hotel room. Stalkers' victims, the ones they kill, are always women.

But even a nice mom and dad like this can't really sense how their child's been assaulted by commercialism ever since she was little, how she's lived in fear of being eaten alive by the morons around her. They just don't get it. Mom always lectures me about not being afraid of getting hurt, but all she can imagine is the kind of hurt she's experienced herself. She has no idea of the threats that surround kids these days, how much we're bullied, how much hurt this causes.