Quotes About Consumerism

Society is secretly driven by sales

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

The reality is that in much of industrialized societies, we are completely addicted to comfort. We are a society of addicts.

[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo.

I think it's the society that drains us out, and we are in a society where we are driven by money.

I spent hours flipping through the stations, watching Pat Robertson preach about society's evils and then ask people to call him with their credit card number.

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.

I think commercialism helps Christmas and I think that the more capitalism we can inject into the Christmas holiday the more spiritual I feel about it

Do not allow consumerism to dictate your spiritual practice. You need nothing more than your focused attention to gain enlightenment.

I call tennis the McDonald's of sport - you go in, they make a quick buck out of you, and you're out.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

It is by manipulating "hidden forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares—a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate. And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces—and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with—that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War.

He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.

los hombres no son sólo meros compradores de los productos en serie producidos por los grandes trusts, sino que parecen incluso producidos por la omnipotencia de éstos, perdiendo su propia individuación.

Oh Ford, oh Ford!

Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth's to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials.

The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get.

Humans] suffer, during their working hours, from the chronic boredom and frustration imposed by the sort of jobs that have to be done in order to satisfy the artificially stimulated demand for the fruits of fully mechanized mass-production.

Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness

in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.

lands behind the former Iron Curtain: the West has its own versions now. On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the Gen-rich

in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning. Meaning

Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift.