Quotes About Consumerism

The Joneses, nine times out of ten, are financially stupid. That's why they have all that stuff, on borrowed money. Why try to copy them? Worse, why try to impress them?

it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

The odds of getting a diet soda when you order one at the drive-through are roughly better than chance.

So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free.

Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.

Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.

Read…packaged food labels like they're the hottest thing from Oprah's book club.

It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.

What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming.

if you live in a culture that to a large extent equates self-worth with how much and what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion, you will be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in the vain hope of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self there.

The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.

Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.

A large part of many people's lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.

en muchos casos, no estás comprando un producto sino un «realzador de la identidad». Las marcas son, básicamente, identidades colectivas a las que te incorporas pagando. Son

Paradójicamente, lo que mantiene en marcha la llamada «sociedad de consumo» es el hecho de que intentar encontrarte a ti mismo a través de las cosas no funciona. La

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.

The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don't really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self.

The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow.

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more.

Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore "exclusive." If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.

The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things.

Only the darkest of them, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967–8), ever seemed in tune with a decade of civil disobedience and anti-imperialist guerrilla wars, although the series inevitably sided with a global military and Euro-cool consumerism.

It was hard to believe that in a society of computer chips, banana chips, and anti-lock brakes, of sitcoms, Home Shopping Clubs, and pay-per-view, and of surround-sound stereos and microwave ovens—it was hard to believe that such destitution could exist at all, much less under the very nose of the same society… He'd

The Park's nice,' his father conceded, 'but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.