Quotes About Consumerism

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.

Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.

Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady?

That may be true, I thought, But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive? Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: I Love the 80s on VH1.

Manufacturers these days have peculiar problems: a package may recommend the virtues of its product by voice only, for it is not allowed to grab the customer by the sleeve or collar.

Cows do not sell each other hay when they are hungry. Monkeys do not sell each other bananas. Only human beings can create the perception in other human beings that, even though they have showered, they still smell bad and need an underarm deodorant to set things right.

Currently, the physical standards of beauty held up in the media as the goal are actually out of reach for 98 percent of the population. 'This is what is beautiful,' we are told. 'Look like this! Try to be this! You will never be able to, but please keep trying because we are making a lot of money out of your continued failed attempts.

T]he real lie that advertising tells is not so much in what it shows, but in what it leaves out.

I saw other people there. Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. Little kids who looked tired. Fathers in nice coats who looked even more tired. Kids working behind the counters of the food places who looked like they hadn't had the will to live for hours. The machines kept opening and closing. The people kept giving money and getting their change. And it all felt very unsettling to me.

Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?

Henry Thoreau said that we don't own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it's a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.

Because in America, you could have anything you wanted, just as long as you could pay for it. If you couldn't pay, or refused to pay, you would remain needful for ever.

Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it's clothes or food or information, they come to expect it.

We don't own things. Things own us.

Others found the implication odd that they could live their way forever- working and drinking and watching TV- and why they would want to.

We must reject the lie of materialism. Your STUFF, does not dictate Your STATURE.

You want to fall in love with a shoe, go ahead. A shoe can't love you back, but, on the other hand, a shoe can't hurt you too deeply either. And there are so many nice-looking shoes.

Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection. Watch this and get fat and stupid.

In fact, in an overwhelmingly commodified existence, consumption becomes the number one form of entertainment.

Social control through consumerism might have been more benign than through more totalitarian methods, but it set up different kinds of distortions that were increasingly enacted in the deep oscillation between hedonism and puritanism.

Christianity on HP - Buy now, Pray later

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation—our sense of "higher" and "lower." It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality.

If you find yourself in a Whole Foods store, there's an 89 percent chance that the county surrounding you voted for Barack Obama. If you want to find Republicans, go to a county that contains a Cracker Barrel restaurant (62 percent of these counties went for McCain).

A consumer-driven, advertising-dominated culture militates daily against ongoing attachments. It is constantly inviting us to switch to a different brand, try something new, go for a better deal elsewhere. It should not come as a surprise that this begins to affect human relationships as well. A society saturated by market values would be one in which relationships were temporary, loyalties provisional and commitments easily discarded.