Quotes About Consumerism

businessmen learned quickly that working-class tourists had money to spend, too. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in numbers.

It's the outside world that's the prison. The outside world of jobs and cars and cell phones and apartments and grocery stores. Appropriate clothing, plans for a Saturday night, loneliness.

She loathed Christmas, and she loathed the run-up to Christmas, the frenzied shoppers, the tat in the shops, the lights that were put up too early in the streets, the Christmas songs that belted out from overheated shops day after day, the catalogues that poured through her door and into her bin, and above all the insistence on the value of family. Frieda did not value her family and they did not value Frieda. A great gulf lay between them, impassable. The

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them.

In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies—the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections.

It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn't see people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way and he wouldn't notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit.

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world's future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

Idéologie de l'homme moderne: acheter le plus d'objets possibles; réaliser le plus de voyages possibles; copuler le plus grand nombre de fois possible.

Heinrich Heine: "We want to establish the kingdom of heaven here on earth." But which one, Heine? The socialist paradise they dream of in consumer society, or the consumer society they dream of in socialist paradise. — Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

Heinrich Heine: "We want to establish the kingdom of heaven here on earth." But which one, Heine? The socialist paradise they dream of in consumer society, or the consumer society they dream of in socialist paradise.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like.

You confuse our higher and lower functions, harnessing our drives and motivating us down an unnatural path, one in which human beings are reprogrammed to covet products and ignore reality.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino." - Joe Fox

The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.

I'm pretty content with what I have, but the one thing that I don't have is something like the iPod - but PC-based. I think that would be cool.

For a consumer society thrives by stoking unquenchable desires into unsustainable cravings and fanning them with an inflated rage for rights. The restlessness it creates by providing false satisfactions and deadening true desires simultaneously fuels the economy and destroys happiness.

The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today's world. All that counts is appearance, and the world of consumerism has lost no time in catering to every need, and then creating even more, in this burgeoning market of the appearance.

With the ability to produce more goods than people need, consumer capitalism has to make children into consumers earlier and keep them at it longer. Hence contemporary America, a culture of perennial adolescents.