Quotes About Consumerism

Buying is much more American than thinking.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest

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. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Everything's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

Our desires increase with our possessions.

Consumerism has become a hypnosis that keeps our culture immature, as it keeps us overly focused on ourselves and on material desires, instead of on cultivating deeper soul richness. Corn

What, I said, is that a crime here or something? Like only buying one thing at the Gas/Gro?

We're not buying Sam's Club condoms," said Owen. "Their trash bags don't even work.

The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top

there's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.

First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it's fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.

The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with.

Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.

The desire to become a cyborg connects to the new "eternal cycle" of consumerism and product circulation; one character predicts that, "In the future, shopping will become a major form of entertainment". Obviously, this future is now, as afternoons at the mall and The Price Is Right and The Home Shopping Network make abundantly clear.

We have become a nation not of citizens but of consumers.

Most of all, immunize yourself from the drug companies efforts to convince you that you desperately need their advertised products. If you really needed the product, it is unlikely that drug companies would be spending money on advertising. Remember, there aren't many ads for insulin on TV.

America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar and use it up in two weeks.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.

Publicity is the life of this culture. Without publicity capitalism could not survive and at the same time publicity is its dream.

The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible.This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes,will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. (P. 125)

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.