Quotes About Consumerism

Cet empire du jetable finit par toucher l'homme lui-même, dont on peut se demander si, au terme du processus, il n'est pas devenu obsolète à son tour.

Which is what it all comes down to, I suppose—how you're selling. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the only opinion of you that matters is the one that isn't your own. Rate My Tits. Rate My Ass. Rate My Children. Rate My Essential Being. 1 Star: Awful. This Being left me feeling like I wanted more.

The question becomes not just how to accumulate more, but how to covet less.

We wear our lives Like costumes Use bills and coins like props In an over budget production That we cannot seem to stop So it just goes on like this As if we accept this As if we've all become Buddhas of mass production Our brains rotting Like teeth Under the sweet Unending bliss of false enlightenment.

The doors of Target opened with a welcoming swoosh, and I was instantly distracted. Yeah. Target does that to me. I feel at home. They've got stuff I need. Stuff I don't need. Stuff I didn't even know I wanted. Neatly placed and waiting for me. I love that place.

Donovan Beaudry rolled his window down; ear-splittingly loud rap music exploded from the truck's custom-installed sound gear. The SUV rolled on twenty-four-inch dubs and sported a shiny set of Sprewells that Justin knew cost around $2,000 a set. The hubcaps continued to spin even after the car came to a stop. He didn't even want to think about how Donovan could have paid for all that.

Nickel a pop, tops.

Why?" Eve leaned forward. "Sincerely, I've always wanted to know why anyone buys multiple pairs of shoes at a time." "If I have to explain it, the joy is lost.

Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.

We now buy watches primarily for their looks, price, or additional functions. The fact that they tell time seems lost.

There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.

I quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.

I hate the way market forces try to separate us out in to the appropriate demographic - basically in order to sell us things. We need to find stories that we can enjoy together, not separately.

Affordable luxury - these are two words that don't go together.

Impossible to believe we need so much as the world wants us to buy. I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).

Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And, once again, notice that the true metric of prosperity is time. If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free time.

When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.

Superficiality is the curse of the modern world.

We can never get enough of what we don't really need.

We study there a lot because... what other choice does society give us, right? It's Starbucks or death, sometimes.

Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children's future, your way and view of life.

Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America's consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.

Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need? I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can.