Quotes About Consumerism

Eighty dollars for a T-shirt - that's how you know the brand is good.

We've sussed that we've paid all this money to watch ourselves entertain ourselves. We have more members of the public on TV than on C&A's CCTV.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

And I don't believe in this materialism, in this consumer society, in this capitalism, in this outrageous horror that happens / takes place here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it "a day will come." And one day it will come. Well, probably it won't come, since they've always destroyed it for us…. It won't come, and I believe in it anyway. Because if I can't believe in it anymore then I can't write anymore either.

That's what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That's what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

But Godenheimer's had the best and cheapest silver foxes, and buttered Frau Breitwehr up, and called her "Madam" every other sentence. So she bought the silver fox fur. When she wears it, they look like a rich fur taking a poor woman out for a walk.

The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.

?nsanlar on bir ay boyunca kenti seviyorlar, kente toz kondurmuyorlard?; gökdelenler, otomatik sigara sat?c?lar?, panoramik perdeli sinemalar sürekli bir çekicilik kayna?? say?l?yordu. Bu duyguyu kesinlikle payla?mayan tek ki?i ise Marcovaldo idi.

The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.

P7- citizens have learned to think rich and live poor.

everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor. Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

Laura had read somewhere that tweens—eight to fourteen-year-olds—had so much discretionary income and expensive tastes that they drove the whole economy. Not just the US economy, but the world's. She

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.

The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.

Material betterment has gone hand in hand with spiritual decline.

We're fat, we're greedy, and we don't give a shit. Our religion is TV. Our saviour is Bill Gates. We've learned our lessons well. We know how to put number one first.

The British are civilized. People still read and some conversations can be interesting. By contrast American are fat and stupid and so thoroughly brain-blurred and over-sold by our culture that there's a numbing, unapologetic, arrogance and desperation about us. In fact, I've just defined the perfect consumer.

We are morally adrift, spiritually bankrupt, enamored with the ever-growing catalog of false idols that is consumerism, politically gullible, rage-drunk, media fattened, and ripe for a culling at the hands of one tragedy or another that will no doubt rip the golden dome of American life off its rotten foundations.

How did people raise kids before plastic came along? "Everything for Baby", said the sign over the aisle we were in. It should have said, "Everything for Baby Is Made from Molded Plastic in Ugly Primary Colors.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Author Bill Bryson has this to say about our national obsession with shopping-- 'We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.