Quotes About Consumerism

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

We're a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others. There

Today's mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite… Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized 'simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.

It also attracts thousands of others to the faith. Bland secular platitudes, consumer junk, and cheap nihilism feed nobody's soul. These things strangle the heart.

There sure are a lot of these 'instant' products on the market. Instant coffee, instant tea, instant pudding, instant cereal... instant dislike.

Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality.

Food. Water. Shelter. Air. Sleep. Societal inflation has expanded need into greed. Suddenly the basic survival needs also include a cell phone, cable TV, and French manicured fingernails.... We've become the absolute biggest whiners of all human history with the absolute smallest justification for whining.

He was reminded of TV ads for plug-in air fresheners where some woman would stick the little plastic thing in a socket and animated fumes would waft out and everyone would lift their faces, close their eyes, breathe in deeply and go 'Aaaaaah'. Like they were taking some kind of drug rather than inhaling chemicals.

Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.

Some problems in the world seem to exist solely for women. Like not having anything to wear.

If you camp out at the store for a TV, you are a good consumer. If you camp out for social justice, you're a dirty hippie and will be pepper-sprayed.

Junk mail, junk food, our society is full of junk living, period.

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.

So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free.

In general, they refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV.

Advertisements at 1 a.m. are nauseating.

We live in a fast-food culture, in which we are led to believe that we need to have everything now; it is a culture that causes people to lose a sense of a future worth waiting for.

I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness.

Our society doesn't promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn't sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now.

Buying things is only sometimes about owning the things. Buying often is simply about what 50 Cent observed: being ABLE to buy. Having less means hearing "No, you cannot have that," and we loathe being told what we can and cannot do.

Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

Spending more money ensures greater happiness. This is the confused thinking of the duped consumer.