Quotes About Consumerism

They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and cars.

At root fame is a sham. I'm not going to live forever and if I am I certainly need don't you to tell me that so that I will buy a car or a box of dried up crackers.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

I'm part of the consumer culture. I was part of the baby boom generation. I have a car when I shouldn't, a couple of computers; I can't be anti-consumerist in that sense.

You can't show me an ad on TV with hard bodies and say I have to buy that car. You have to tell me why that car is better and safer than another car.

Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.

Helen recognised that she, and Edward, and Dorothy herself, for that matter, were not as others are when it came to possession. She seldom wanted anything. Edward was the same. Her mother had hated spending money, not out of parsimony but laziness. Whatever it was in the make-up of most people that responds to the sight of goods for sale had been left out, in their case.

Toshiba and Hitachi made better sets at the time, only they showed them on the Ginza in Tokyo and in the big-city department stores, making it pretty clear that farmers were not particularly welcome in such elegant surroundings. Matsushita went to the farmers and sold its televisions door-to-door, something no one in Japan had ever done before for anything more expensive than cotton pants or aprons.

2. Greed, or acquisitive desire.

All she knew was what she read in the papers, where it seemed that people no longer lived their lives, but had life-styles instead.

Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wealth and taste.

Should thousands of animals suffer so that a new kind of lipstick or floor wax can be put on the market?

In the United States, 97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV.

The powers that be don't necessarily view you as a citizen, a voter, or a person. You're a consumer. You're someone who buys products, then consumes them. After you eat it, use it up, or wear it out, you buy more.

Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.

It's not just the drive. They're right out front. Everywhere. Waiting for me. All day and night." "Who are, dear?" "Robots selling things. As soon as I set down the ship. Robots and visual-audio ads. They dig right into a man's brain. They follow people around until they die.

If you don't buy, they'll kill you. The perfect sales-pitch. Buy or die—new slogan.

En otras palabras, estos objetos quedan superados al año de ser lanzados al mercado: inútiles, pequeños, insuficientes. Si no son reemplazados, si no compras uno nuevo, un modelo más perfeccionado...

How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale "How the Sea Became Salt." Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.

They always said the way to sell something was create anxiety in people. Create a sense of insecurity— tell them they smell bad or look funny. But this makes a joke out of deodorant and hair oil. You can't escape this. If you don't buy, they'll kill you. The perfect sales-pitch.

C'è soltanto una cosa di cui puoi essere sicuro. Quelli che oggi vendono sapone, domani puzzano. Le industrie non sono enti benefici.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale How the Sea Became Salt.

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome

you can make a fortune selling people what they want, but you can go broke selling them what they need.