Quotes About Consumerism

there are many ways to interdict the growth of competence, of clear thinking, of forceful purpose, and each is a talking choo-choo in different guise: think of slasher flicks, think of pornography, think of Big Macs or tabloid/network news — each is easy to take, each seemingly an inconsequential time-killer. But ah! The ensemble of them playing their mindless tunes — the Death of a Thousand Cuts!

The search for a material paradise is a flight away from humanity into the sterile nonlife of mechanisms where everything is perfect until it becomes junk.

The extreme wealth of American big business is the direct result of school having trained us in certain attitudes like a craving for novelty. That's what the bells are for. They don't ring so much as to say ,"Now for something different".

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.

They eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea--all at once. The turd look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.

There's even a name for the people who have the most stuff. They're called hoarders. Back in the day they were just called grandmothers.

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

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.

If enough dishonest merchants water their milk, more and more customers will forget what normal milk tastes like and buy only the cheaper - watered down - variety.

Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.

Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.

I shop therefore I am.

Anyone with more than 365 pair of shoes is a pig.

Beware the pull on your heartstrings -- it's often the pursestrings that are actually being reached for.

So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.

I have no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.

There had been studies years ago that showed that when you presented consumers with multifarious choices—like, say, fifteen different types and brands of jelly—they had a harder time deciding, took longer to make up their minds, and were less satisfied with their ultimate selection than those who'd chosen from a narrower band of options. Elayah feared buying the wrong jelly. Only the jelly was her life.

In 2005, Abercrombie & Fitch ran an ad campaign like this and sold T-shirts with mottos like "Who needs brains when you have these?" and "Blondes Are Adored, Brunettes Are Ignored.

Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?

The American conception of advertising is to arouse desires and stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and by constant iteration to send them out to work harder to get the latest model--whether that model be an icebox or a rug or a new home.

I like 'X Factor' as much as the next person, but I do get overwhelmed with the amount of reality TV. It's such cheap programming and such a load of rubbish, most of it.

You don't realize how much you use your credit card not even to buy things. It's a card you get so you can navigate society.