Quotes About Consumerism

The theme my generation explored was the relationship between capitalism and art.

We're so surrounded by so much of this marketing and just being told on a regular basis that you have to like this, you will go here, you want this. I found that to me that fit perfectly into what a theme park of dinosaur would be about.

We want God back in the public square, but for too many of us, religion is a pious veneer over our own unconscious worship of materialism. We want a faith that makes us feel good about ourselves, not one that makes demands we'd rather not obey. We've turned religion into another consumer good. Our faith does not help us stand against the money-driven materialist culture, but instead baptizes our participation in it.

To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes.

And so a population that has been wholly propagandized by a totalitarian state, and demoralized by hedonistic consumerism, will hardly be in a position even to imagine opposition to its command-and-control strategies.

How do you take a medium seriously when it is so laced with high decibel reminders to run right out to your supermarket, your drug store, your friendly car dealer, your favorite department store and buy.... That's the twentieth century marching song — buy!

money so they say is the root of all evil today

Instead—out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need—we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory—a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.

He didn't believe in God, but he believed even less in cheapness. Besides, life's never been anything else except a brief, frightened, bewildered shopping expedition.

As you know, when an American sees another driving a Cadillac, he says to himself: 'One day I too will drive a Cadillac.' But when a Frenchman feels intimidated by someone else's car, he says: 'Why can't the bum drive a jalopy, like everyone else?

So many aspects of the Jazz Age recall our own: political corruption and complacency; fear of outsiders; life-changing technologies; cults of youth, excess, consumerism and celebrity; profit as a new religion on the one hand and the easy availability of credit on the other; astonishing affluence and yet a huge section of society unable to move out of poverty.

Americans are being poisoned, all in the name of profit, producing a weak-minded race of people who are given to lust and desire.

Probably the worst thing that has happened to our understanding of reality has been the acceptance of ourselves as consumers.

Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers--ugly. No! I don't want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

whats the point to spend money you haven't earned, to buy thingsyou don't need, to impress people you don't like

If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, value is in the mind of the consumer.

A little into it they fucked for a kid. Squeezed one out. Couple years later fucked for another. Now she's here. One more broad in a big-ass truck with the ring, the two kids, the latest cell phone.

The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is.

Modern mass culture, aimed at the consumer, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being

Excuse me, Pinchy," I say quickly (before he can start a third verse), "but isn't everything in the Two-Dollar Shop always only two dollars?

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

So today if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it's probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went to the store and bought the look that you both like. So forget it. Just think about all the James Deans and what it means.

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.