Quotes About Consumerism

We very quickly forget about the wonderful things we've got. People lose their excitement because there's too much. Basically we're experiencing nothing, because everything is available to us.

Since turning 40 I happily moisturise - I have what's called a regime - but I'm always in two minds because I have no idea if I'm completely wasting my money. They feel nice when they are on but I can't stop wondering, 'Am I succumbing to the same nonsense I try to fight against in other areas?'

We live in such a consumer-based world. Everything we do, someone else has provided for us, so there is something really empowering about knowing that once I have found the right pieces of wood, I can start a fire and keep myself warm and skin an animal to eat and make its skin into leather.

Today, most women are surrounded by ingenious gadgets. They don't grow the peas or raise the chicken that they serve for dinner; instead they hunt and gather in the grocery store. They go through catalogs or department stores to buy clothes instead of shearing sheep, carding wool, and weaving cloth for skirts and coats and blankets.

Happiness, as a word, has become sort of equated with these smiling images on television, selling some nice cream or food product or something. It's seen a bit as being a stupid consumer.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.

I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die.

In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops - fun at such a fever pitch as to sometimes seem threatening, numbing, even agonizing.

The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture.

I remember when the Bic pen was controversial. They came from France. They were cheap, and when one was out of ink, you threw it away; you didn't dip it into more ink.

The corporations are shoving just the worst music down everybody's throats, and I think the result of that is that nobody has any taste. They have no bar as to what is good.

It drives me crazy to throw something out. I find planned obsolescence revolting.

You know that 40 percent of the food in the United States gets thrown away because it doesn't look a certain way. It's crazy: just because the apple is not the right size or the carrot is not straight enough, it just doesn't get accepted.

I quickly came to realize that in the Middle East, God is God, and in the West, the sponsor is God - or, as I like to say, Tide detergent is God.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.

The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

I'm just like so many women - I was frustrated, I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on, and you get home and you think, 'What am I really supposed to wear under this?' So it was a frustrated consumer moment.

Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?

When people come to my act any time after Thanksgiving, I usually say, You shouldn't be here. You should be shopping. Our economy depends on you! You should be out there buying stuff.'

Every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

No one's on at my time but infomercials.