Quotes About Consumerism

The more storage you have, the more stuff you accumulate.

As human beings, we're very materialistic and have all this stuff - furs and cars and diamonds and money.

The reality of America is mass-market stupidity.

I founded Stitch Fix to take on a very human problem: How do I find clothes I love? Like most people, I want to look stylish and feel my best. Spending a day at the mall or devoting hours of time to sifting through millions of products online is time consuming, overwhelming, and neither effective nor enjoyable. I knew there had to be another way.

I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.

Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he's going for - 14-year-old white suburban girls.

We inside Diesel are the first consumers of our advertising. We make ad campaigns for our own amusement - that's why they succeed.

Markets are not just about the steam engine, iron foundries, or today's silicon-chip factories. Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, and consumer society.

Mark Liszewski, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania), remarked: "Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it's Apple versus Android. And instead of customizing their ride, today's teens customize their phones with covers and apps. You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.

Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.

A Christmas shopper's complaint is one of long-standing.

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.

The Hidden Persuaders

You can probably make them do anything for you: Sell people things they don't need; make women who don't know you fall in love with you.

Drug companies don't have hearts or consciences. They want to sell you drugs. The company doesn't give a fig whether the drug makes you ill or kills you. The company just wants your money.

The Hoover Commission agreed. Leisure was not, in fact, an excuse to relax. It was a hole to fill up with more wants (which, in turn, required more work to pay for them). Somehow the consumer solution satisfied both the industrial hedonists hell-bent on achieving a material paradise and the puritans who feared that unoccupied leisure would lead to sin. In fact, the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

People in industrialized nations used to be called "citizens." Now we are "consumers"—which means (according to the dictionary definition of "consume") people who "use up," "waste," "destroy," and "squander.

the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

By late 2017, consumer debt had topped $3.7 trillion, more than double the total at the end of 2000. That's more than $11,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills—but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff—that sends us back to work again!

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better, "enough" is like the horizon—always receding. You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop. This is a psychological cul-de-sac, an invisible catch-22 of the consumer myth of more. If more is better, then what I have is not enough.

In fact, we now meet most of our needs, wants, and desires through money. We buy everything from hope to happiness. We no longer live life. We consume it.

We no longer live life. We consume it.