Quotes About Consumerism

Bueno, al fin y al cabo, esta es la era del tejido desechable. Tratamos a la gente como si fueran pañuelos de papel. Los estrujamos después de utilizarlos, los tiramos, cogemos otro, nos sonamos, lo estrujamos, lo tiramos. Todo el mundo usa la ropa de todo el mundo.

But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm, do you follow me?

La gente no habla de nada. - ¡Oh, de algo hablarán! - No, de nada. Nombran una serie de automóviles, hablan de ropa o de piscinas y dicen que es estupendo. Pero todos comentan lo mismo y nadie tiene una idea original.

La gente no habla de nada. –Oh, tienen que hablar de algo. –No, no, de nada. Citan automóviles, ropas, piscinas, y dicen ¡qué bien! Pero siempre repiten lo mismo, y nadie dice nada diferente, y la mayor parte del tiempo, en los cafés, hacen funcionar los gramófonos automáticos de chistes, y escuchan chistes viejos

People don't talk about anything." "Oh, they must!" "No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell!

In our own culture, we might call it "catalogue consciousness," obsessively rifling through the pages to see what else we might want. It's "wanting to want," and it's a disease our culture keeps nourishing.

Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.

Popular! In America, what else matters?

How ironic, it seemed to me, yet, perhaps, how symbolic, that in our age of rapid mass production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies and textbooks! Of

I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.

I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.

For I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.

Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God.

In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion.

When a god is fashioned into a golden commodity (or even lesser material); divine subject becomes divine object, and agent becomes commodity.

In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.

There will be no peace without a lowering of consumerism to match the banishment of arms. For the arms serve primarily either to usurp what belongs to others or to guarantee an arrangement already inequitable. The arms cannot be given up without abandoning swollen appetites as well.

In our case, we live in a National Security State that is committed to perpetual war, in a consumerism that reduces everything and everyone to a commodity. As a consequence, children become statistics for sales reports, military recruitment, prison population, and debt. It is, among us, all about subordinating the future of children to the success of market ideology wherein the money and power flow to the top of the pyramid while increasing numbers of children are left behind.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.

Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now.

The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.

We haven't accepted we can't really believe that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.

Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.

The happiness of a mannequin is to be in a shop window."