Quotes About Consumerism

Here's the thing about Apple, we complain and they give us more battery life. We complain and they'll give us more stuff. Everything's beta right now. Everything's experimental. They really don't know what people want.

Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism.

I will go out of my way to avoid the shopping crowds and the extreme consumerism - I hate all that.

I wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?

In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope.

We're very good in America at talking about stuff, often stuff to buy. We tend to talk about our iPods. We tend to talk about cars or new fads.

Contrary to what most people believe, fads are made, not born.

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.

I think teens trust each other's opinions about products because of the quality of authenticity that they think their friend's recommendation has.

Why is everyone so obsessed with attracting the young? The Telegraph, Radio 4 - everyone wants a younger audience when everyone knows the population is getting older and older, and that older people have more dosh than young people.

I don't think the government is out to get me or help someone else get me but it wouldn't surprise me if they were out to sell me something or help someone else sell me something. I mean, why else would the Census Bureau want to know my telephone number?

Television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness.

Almost every single commercial on television for shampoo, sports shoes, drinks, food, clothes, perfume, cars, etc., is a short fairy tale, for they are given magical qualities.

But in terms of the code by which we go to market - it's not telling kids to supersize, we're not selling them, generally, products, in the advertising we do to them.

I'm just sick of the way things are. We're in an age in which we can't live without accepting the logic of the market. Contemporary politics is all about short-term pragmatism. We have abandoned religion and philosophy... What we have left is the automatisation of doing what the market tells us.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?

Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.

Although advertising began in the late nineteenth century with the development of the first branded products, its true explosion came in the 1920s, when it became increasingly tied to the newly invented radio.

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he'd seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. "Why'd you buy them if you weren't going to watch them?" she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. "My childhood was on sale," he said at last, "so I bought it.

Eventually I grew into a man who spent money I didn't have, buying things I didn't need to impress people I didn't like. What a poor way to live.

After we are born, we begin the departure from our spiritual power and descend into more of what this damaged world wants us to be. We become more about acquiring, hoarding and comparing instead of creating, helping and adventuring.