Quotes About Consumerism

I have a Mercedes. I wear a Rolex watch. I have no problem with the selling of things.

Also, mugs, like car bumpers and T-shirts, have become places for people to proclaim allegiances, names, hobbies, heroes, graphic tastes.

I am not proud of the fact that major ingredients of my emotional history are available for purchase today at CVS.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

The point of advertising is to destroy markets.

We live in a society where the "nothing" (shopping, watching TV) has become a "something" and the "something" (relaxing, meditating, sharing) has become a void in need of being filled.

Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.

What we have to do is trap them into consumerism. Carry out enough propaganda and teasers and so on to make freed slaves feel they've got to have these commodities. They go to the company store and they get them, they're in debt, and pretty soon they're trapped—the slave economy's back.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome." ? Noam Chomsky

If you've ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that's what advertising is.

Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In

So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really "need" anything new, so we only create what we want.

A person native to the twenty-first century can't really reconcile why anyone would pay $13.25 for twelve fixed songs that could only be played on specific high-end electronics serving no other function; the majority of all recorded music can now be instantly accessed anywhere for less than $10 a month.

However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.

Hardcore Gen X-tacy was a fringe concern. Things regularly cited as generationally totemistic were almost always less popular than things devoid of cultural timeliness. Bridget Jones's Diary was more widely read than Jesus' Son. For every album sold by Courtney Love, Shania Twain sold fourteen. Over and over, the gap between what's most associated with Generation X dogma and the behavior of Generation X consumers is illogically vast.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.

We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.

What would Tyler Durden do?