Quotes About Consumerism

Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

Adam doesn't get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets.

We have moved to a level where we have made happiness and contentment largely impossible. We have created a pseudo-happiness, largely based in having instead of being. We are so overstimulated that the ordinary no longer delights us. We cannot rest or abide in our naked being in God, as Jesus offers us.

Even Martin Luther's needed "justification by faith" sent us on a five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual.* Thus leaving us with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism.

It is strange that when people have so much, they are so anxious about not having enough—to do, to see, to own, to fix, to control, to change.

In a materialistic society we have projected our sense of worth almost exclusively onto things. That is why it's hard to rediscover our souls in ourselves.

Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.

was that what people had thought of as the good big one now would become the shitty little one. Worse, the quickest way to beget a new desire, Bea knew, was to satisfy an old one, and each new desire had a way of becoming more expensive than the last. If she was foolish enough to gratify her customers' current demands, who knew what they'd dream up next?

It was for this reason he'd always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them.

And do I perhaps miss the point altogether? Is the guy who wears Tommy on his back participating in a clever, knowing, postmodern joke, whose unspoken text is that we all secretly care about labels, so why not acknowledge that in big campy letters? It may be. But I don't think so.

Like you have to constantly prove your worth. From the movies that you watch to the songs on your radio. Down to the magazines placed ever so neatly in the grocery house, you know the ones with the movie stars. Since they wouldn't make any money if you already loved who you are. See there is no profit in saying you're already perfect and beautiful too.

From the movies that you watch to the songs on your radio. Down to the magazines placed ever so neatly in the grocery house, you know the ones with the movie stars. Since they wouldn't make any money if you already loved who you are. See there is no profit in saying you're already perfect and beautiful too.

materialism takes root in early childhood, and is driven mainly by low self-esteem.

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.

These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization—the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor.

How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.

The most valued pleasure of the people I knew was a car, the most cherished experience a bottle of whisky, the most sought-after prize somebody else's wife.

As you may have noticed, here we were living in a Swedish car in the parking lot of a Swedish mega-retailer. ??

Many people are driven by materialism. Their desire to acquire becomes the whole goal of their lives. This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.

Buying and selling, that's all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence.

The standards of beauty in America's über-culture are purposefully set too high so that we will buy anything in our frantic scramble to become attractive. We are meant to feel crushed, inadequate, and less-than so that we'll buy more and more things in the vain hope of fixing ourselves.

Holy Abercrombie catalog , Megan thought.

Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.