Quotes About Consumerism

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.

The people who are rebelling meaningfully don't buy a lot of stuff.

You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.

you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don't flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.

The counter woman seemed unaware that Toni Ware was affecting the exact accent and cadence of her own speech. The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Sono l'unica persona al mondo ad essere convinta che la causa del numero crescente di fatti di cronaca in cui persone all'apparenza assolutamente normali cominciano a sparare con pistole automatiche nei centri commerciali, nelle agenzie di assicurazione, nelle cliniche private e nei McDonald's dipende anche dal fatto che posti del genere sono ben noti vivai di propagazione del Sorriso Professionale?

Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged

That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ's sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO's. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation.

their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning.

Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.

Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV's sham "breakthrough programs": Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of "freshness" and "outrageousness" to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we've all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.

Of course it's true that an unprecedented number of young Americans have big disposable incomes, fine tastes, nice things, competent accountants, access to exotic intoxicants, attractive sex partners, and are still deeply unhappy.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely

because the technology is going to get better and better, and it's going to get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money . . that's fine, in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die. In a very meaningful way, you're going to die.

You could say that a commercial movie doesn't try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it.

In California, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into TV shows.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

Today the treatment of such themes is more explicit than ever; moreover, advertising encourages men as well as women to see the creation of the self as the highest form of creativity.

In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.