Quotes About Consumerism

It is another of consumerism's ironies that, although it functions like a mental trap, we often think of it as an escape.

Luhrs, who went on to write a popular deconsumer handbook called The Simple Living Guide,

We can't stop shopping, we must stop shopping. It isn't only that consumption is distorting the climate, felling the forests, cluttering out lives, filling our heads with a throwaway mindset, even stealing the stars from the night sky. The worst is that it leaves us with no idea of what else to do, no belief that things can be different. Whichever way we go, it leaves us doomed.

When the shopping trolley was first invented, it was a complete failure - people were used to either carrying a basket around with them, or asking the grocer to fill their bag with their chosen items. The shoppers didn't seem to want to try this new method, so the inventor, Sylvan Goldman, hired dummy shoppers to walk around his store with trolleys, and had an employee offering one to patrons as they entered - and yet it still took a long time to catch on!

The American people are sheep. They're comfortable, rich, working. It's like the Romans, they're happy with bread and their spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to them than any right.

Spiritual life may initially be focused on self-transformation, but as mindfulness and compassion grow we naturally become attentive to the values of the society around us. When we do so, we can see how the popular promise of happiness through greed and excess consumerism is increasingly shallow and false.

One can best describe the culture of consumerism as the unbridled consumption of commodities for the satisfaction of psychological needs that cannot be satisfied through the practice of consumption

Did money give people a blind spot? Rob them of their hearing?

The more you add to what you have, the less you are. Accumulating more, concentrating all your effort in the quest for things you can have, means losing your being in the process.... Being involves something different than the quest for having. Adding to what you have means losing your being.

Because we have so much eye candy and mind candy, spending so much time trying to pay the rent, all of this conspires to keep us from thinking too hard or taking action from that. Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen.

Yet I have come to distrust book jackets calculated to prick desire like a Bloomingdale's window, as if you could wear what you read.

Elizabeth liked commercials. They were anti-death. You had to be alive to buy things.

The second toxic myth is that more is better. More of anything is better than what we have. It's the logical response if you fear there's not enough, but more is better drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race.

When we are focused constantly on the next thing—the next dress, the next car, the next job, the next vacation, the next home improvement—we hardly experience the gifts of that which we have now.

In our relationship with money, more is better distracts us from living more mindfully and richly with what we have.

generally treating free-market capitalism as a kind of state religion.

John Sharpe summarizes it well in his review of G. K. Chesterton's Outline of Sanity: The world today operates by ". . . consuming the world's limited resources to produce an ever-expanding stream of products which are designed to wear out or become quickly outmoded, and for which the need is more often than not created by advertising, and not by necessity.

No one with feeds things about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

No one with feeds thinks about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.

It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

We Americans," he said, "are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them"—he pointed at his daughter—"what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

A nosotros los estadounidenses, lo único que nos interesa es el consumo de nuestros productos. No nos interesa cómo los fabrican o qué les pasa, lo que pasa cuando los desechamos, cuando los tiramos a la basura.

Cars were stopped in the middle of roads so people could run into discount clothing stores.