Quotes About Consumerism

They sounded like those awful people on info-holograms. It dices, it slices! But wait! There's more!

You will take no more than you need, and waste nothing. People will attempt to buy your friendship. They will lavish things upon you. Accept nothing but the barest of human necessities.

Now there was a supply of anonymous parts for anyone who wanted them. And even if you didn't want younger hands or brighter eyes, there were advertisements everywhere to convince you that you did. 'A new you from the inside out!' the billboards said. 'Add fifty years to your life.' Sonia shakes her head bitterly. They created want...and want turned to need...and unwinding became woven into the fabric of everything.

At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Then I opened the bread. It was green and moldy and had a sharp sour smell. How could they sell bread like that? What kind of a place was Florida?

BILLS! BILLS! BILLS!' she screamed. 'IS THAT ALL YOU CAN BRING ME? THESE BILLS?' 'Yes, mam, that's all I can bring you.' I turned and walked on. It wasn't my fault that they used telephones and gas and light and bought all their things on credit. Yet when I brought them their bills they screamed at me - as if I had asked them to have a phone installed, or a $350 t.v. set sent over with no money down.

The public is fortunate. Everything pleases them: icecream cones, rock concerts, singing, swinging, love, hate, masturbation, hot dogs, country dances, Jesus Christ, roller skating, spiritualism, capitalism, communism, circumcision, comic strips, Bob Hope, skiing, fishing murder bowling debating, anything. They don't expect much and they don't get much. They are one grand gang.

Here in America a man ain't a man unless he's got three or four whores and a late model car. All right, I'm a little drunk. Maybe that's why I mock myself. But put a new car and 3 women on my back and I'm fucked. I don't have a t.v. I don't even have a radio. A big Brazilian cunt who wants to put that thing on me, calls me the last of the monsters.

That's what he told me. He said that in America you have to spend your money or they'll take it away. Now they can't take mine away: I don't have any.

I can't help feeling that the good books were purchased because they were talked of as being popular, and the trash was bought because it suited best.

the ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.

money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

either they're trying to upsell you a fifty-quid-a-head artisanal pork pie (serving this week: Peppa Pig's Uncle Bertie's left haunch, marinaded in a drizzle of preschoolers' tears) or

Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.

The governing ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses—to own the same model of car or dishwasher or lawn mower.

We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.

Most car advertising assumes that people have IQs that are missing a digit.

It's not as though you feel satisfied after collecting a certain amount of stuff. Instead, you keep thinking about what you're missing.

I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.

People in Shanghai make a lot more money than the farmers in the rice paddies. The rice-paddy farmers are not buying Louis Vuitton bags, but the upwardly mobile ones in Shanghai, who are all working in Wall Street-type firms, are infinitely better-dressed than people in the West. Their women take this fashion thing seriously.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

Modern life undermines any attempt at building communities and making connections with people without commerce.

Now, if you're Al Gore, you can afford $10 a pop for squiggly-pig-tailed fluorescent light bulbs. But if you're mainstream America, two or three kids, mom and dad working outside the home, that's not a very good deal.

It's easier to force feed people than it is to give 'em what they want. It makes more money.