Quotes About Consumerism

The generation that bought the most shoes and crippled the moral footing

Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but "super". It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch

The end result of a culture of pure consumption is a mountain of pure shit

It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It's just like Animal Planet, only we've got Cover Girl and Victoria's Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale.

It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.

Who needs toothpaste when you have cigarettes?

But I think technology advertising will have to stop addressing how products are made and concentrate more on what a product will do for the consumer.

It's not a case of 'look at me in my car' it's more, 'look at the car'. I like the idea of other people enjoying them, because everything has become a bit faceless and nobody likes the motor car any more.

I saw a stupid ad for a microwave that cooks in ten seconds. Are there really people who say, "I've been home for ten seconds, where the hell is dinner?"

People want the freedom. They want to be able to shop. If you don't like the shop trading hours and you're a shop owner, you don't have to open.

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and smug in "the social," our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

We're not Christians, we're capitalists," he said. "Everybody in this whangdanged country is a capitalist, whether he likes it or not. Everyone in this country is one of the world's most voracious consumers, using resources at a rate twenty times greater than that of anyone else on this poor earth. And Christmas is our golden opportunity to pick up the pace.

Les places sont envahies de chaises en plastique et de parasols dédiés au dieu Coca-Cola.

Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution — turn one's back on American cinema.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

I shop at a computer store called, "Your Crap Is Already Obsolete."

There is very little that is natural left in people when they stray from the cities. Day hiking in Gore-Tex with a bag of trail mix and a cell phone in a fanny pack and a bottle of iced chai tea clipped to your belt isn't actually natural, it's tourism, or worse, voyeurism.

At the end of the day, we supported globalization because we wanted to be able to buy cheaper computers, cheaper vehicles, cheaper clothes and cheaper furniture. Wal-Mart parking lots were jammed with North American workers buying bargain-basement-priced goods made in China even if in the process they were shopping themselves right out of their own jobs.