Quotes About Consumerism

materialism takes root in early childhood, and is driven mainly by low self-esteem.26

The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality -- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.

Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it's the new religion; it's everybody's intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit.

He held up a DVD in a blue cardboard envelope, which bore Pete's distinctive scrawl. "Can't believe the technology." "If I have a good Christmas I'll buy myself a DVD player. Still have a year of car payments left." She paused. "Prices keep coming down.

The gradations are infinite and the silliest mistake of all is to define people by their material possessions. It's even worse if people define themselves by money. When

A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.

As for the tank, not only is it unAmerican and probably subversive to eat without watching stereo but also the racket from it would interfere even with a directional mike aimed at us from a distance . . .

A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy…

Since the publication of Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride, and similar books, it has been realized that techniques of inducing mass hallucination or something like mass hallucination are well known to advertisers.

Almost all cigarette smokers, for instance, have a favorite brand and insist that they cannot be satisfied by any other brand. When blindfolded, however, they cannot distinguish this favorite brand from any other brand. They are not buying the cigarettes but buying the package. The same is true of most beer drinkers: they have a favorite brand, but cannot distinguish it from other brands when blindfolded.

This species of mass hallucination has been created by conditioning and association. Each advertiser tries to associate his product with something most domesticated primates desire, such as Sex or Status. The commercials carry the association, sometimes fairly blatantly, sometimes subliminally. The repetition of the association gradually produces the conditioned response. The victim is not exactly buying the package as we just said but buying the hope for Sex and Status.

As Krishnamurti said to Rajneesh, "You want a Rolls Royce? Go to America. Over there, there's a Seeker born every minute." Rajneesh found so many seekers that he eventually owned 93 Rolls Royces.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners . . .

Consumption can never satisfy because the logic of the consumable object demands the creation of new insatiable needs.

We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money.

Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis? Experts at denial. Experts at filtering their information. Many of those walking by went to church on Sundays, believed in God, voted Republican, spent their time shopping and watching TV. Obviously nice people. The world was doomed.

I've also been known to cry during MasterCard commercials.

Beware of curiously shaped or oddly-got-up bottles: you are likely to be paying for the parcel rather than what is wrapped up in it.

I didn't shop. I committed retaliatory consumerism.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

Greed is really the religion of vulgarity.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

Greed has replaced religion as the national religion, and with greed comes envy.