Quotes About Consumerism

One could put it 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.

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 as beggar is a reminder of nothing.

All publicity works upon anxiety.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

We live in the shadow of a great lie, and by the time we figure out that it is a lie we are closing in on death and have become irrelevant consumers, and a new generation of young and relevant consumers takes our place in the great chain of shopping.

You know Chad's definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year's model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

America is a place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas.

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons. ALFRED E. NEWMAN

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

We want our movies instantly. We order our groceries at lunchtime and expect them to arrive in time for dinner. We punch up cars to deliver us to our whims. The largest companies in America, from Amazon to Uber to Facebook, want to fill the air with buzzing drones dropping from the skies whatever you want and more of it. Manna is now always on the delivery menu.

That's the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

They say kids today don't know the value of a dollar. They certainly do know the value of a dollar. That's why they ask for five.

I think the only reason you visit an Apple store is because you wonder what life is like on another planet.

All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.

It's a law of life: the tyranny of things.

It seems to me probable that of all our economic life the element on which we are inclined to place too low an estimate is advertising.

The push for us to throw perfectly good things away and buy new things to replace them so that somebody else can get rich--an idea that goes against our own basic instincts and common sense--still holds us in thrall. We are married to a disposable economy dependent on waste.

Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.

Historically, most people were far too poor to let their tastes in entertainment guide where they chose to live, and cities were hardly pleasure zones. Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases—the dissemination of a selling message.