Quotes About Consumerism

The result is that children now live in an "ethos of fantasy consumerism." Modern American childhood, says Cross

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much mon- ey will it bring in?     —Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831                                         1

Department stores, hotels, and amusement parks began to dot the landscape, and by World War I, buying was seen as the road to happiness. Money became the measure of everything, friendship and religion included.

For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, "democracy" will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy's and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news. Corporate hegemony, the triumph of global democracy/consumerism based on an American model, is the collapse of American civilization. So a large-scale transformation is indeed going on, but it is one that makes triumph indistinguishable from disintegration.

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.

Our modern cities have become in large part agglomerations of bedroom apartments in which men and women spiritually wither away and their personalities become trivialized by the petty concerns of amusement, consumption, and small talk.

Society is ruled by the harsh maxim: "production for the sake of production." The decline from craftsman to worker, from an active to an increasingly passive personality, is completed by man qua consumer—an economic entity whose tastes, values, thoughts and sensibilities are engineered by bureaucratic "teams" in "think tanks." Man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine.

The phrase "consumer society" complements the description of the present social order as an "industrial society." Needs are tailored by the mass media to create a public demand for utterly useless commodities, each carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined period of time. The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

Money is an evolutionary, infantile stagnation in brain development. At the expense of money, a person seeks to return to childhood and stay there.

The consumer has been given no choice, but to keep buying and consuming non-stop.

We want new clothing, more clothing, pretty clothing, because rather than looking at clothing as something to cover the shame of our nakedness, we view it as a sign of status, a source of happiness, or a way to compete or show off.

They're trying to tell us that we're not right, so we have to buy their products. The number one cause of mental illness is not knowing who you are and you can't know who you are if you don't spend time honoring yourself, and living in the present.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod

The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

Tüketici psikodramalarla yat??t?r?lan bir hastad?r.

in 1892, Procter and Gamble invited the public to submit rhymes to advertise Ivory Soap.

Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that 'Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.' Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

Probably one of those who ostentatiously carried plastic bags but never stooped to using one.