Quotes About Consumerism

Americanesia Expressaphobia, n 1. Financial affliction, first diagnosed in late twentieth century, where the sufferer forgets the amount charged on a credit card but is terribly afraid that it's way too much. Closely related to Visago, n, where a high level of debt prompts feelings of nausea and dizziness.

Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels.

Papa, there's an armored jeep guarding the 99¢ store on Old Country Road and you're talking about gomiki?

I wanted to save them from themselves, from the idiotic consumer culture that was bleeding them softly. I

Is it any duller than on EARTH? Whose inhabitants spend most of their lives trying to get laid, watching sitcoms on television, and grunting for money?

You hated it—hated its nasty ugly ways, its noise and smoke and most of all its shaggy shitty itch for gelt, gelt for this and gelt for that until a man couldn't fart without paying

Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natual human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy -working, shopping. and product displaying- to remember what we can signal without all the products.

Consumerism turns the tables on ancestral patterns of human courtship. It makes courtship a commodity that can be bought and sold.

Many products are signals first and material objects second. Our vast social-primate brains evolved to pursue one central social goal: to look good in the eyes of others. Buying impressive products in a money-based economy is just the most recent way to fulfill that goal.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

I figured out years ago that the human species is totally fucked and has been for a long time. I also know that the sick, media-consumer culture in America continues to make this so-called problem worse. But the trick, folks, is not to give a fuck. Like me. I really don't care. I stopped worrying about all this temporal bullshit a long time ago. It's meaningless.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

The Human Species could have been great but instead we became satisfied with lights on our tennis shoes.

You can take and nail two sticks together like they've never been nailed together before and some fool will buy it.

Cigarette companies market heavily to young people. They need young customers because their product kills the older ones. It is the only product that, if used as intended, kills the consumer.

When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts...

It's called the 'American dream' because you have to be asleep to believe it.

We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.

You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.

The women are at an advantage - we represent the buying power in this country.

We often see literature about women that impair and immerse the women themselves, such as when women are portrayed as objects of consumerism.

I have to confess that I've never been a great fan of Christmas or, as it's known in our house, The Monster That Ate the Last Third of the Year. It's mostly the rampant consumerism I object to, but I'm also a little wary of the annual crop of new Christmas stories and sometimes wonder why anyone bothers.

Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?