Quotes About Materialism

The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get.

Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness

in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.

lands behind the former Iron Curtain: the West has its own versions now. On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the Gen-rich

We now see that all the evils of religion can flourish without any belief in the supernatural, that convinced materialists are ready to worship their own jerry-built creations as though they were the Absolute, and that self-styled humanists will persecute their adversaries with all the zeal of the catholic inquisitors exterminating the devotees of a personal and transcendent Satan.

Todos tendemos a exagerar el valor de lo que por casualidad nos pertenece.

in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning. Meaning

one of Huxley's points: in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.

Nereye varacak bu politik materyalizmin sonu? Bu gidi?e dur demenin zaman? geldi art?k!

this was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness.

these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one..They had a daughter...who was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either.

now: he had a kind wife who had a very good government job and he had a house with new furniture, purchased on his wife's salary, and a car that went with his wife's job. All of that was far more important than being noticed by women, and yet, and yet…

a list of people who drive Mercedes-Benzes, and he checks to see if they have made up for it by being kind to people.

How sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this, and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass? None, in her view; none at all, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person

Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity—old money—was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.

But that was what the world was like; we battered and bashed and poured out clouds of smoke and chemicals and particles of every description to bring forth our little objects of desire, our baubles.

Tell him that riches will not procure for you a single moment of happiness. Luxury consoles poverty alone, and at that only for a short time, until one becomes accustomed to it.

I am not in the position to sacrifice the essentials of life in the hope of acquiring the luxuries. -Pushkin

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

Chicago was "the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money

Yes, it is perfectly fine to use your magickal abilities and knowledge to get ahead on this physical plane, to get money, friends, love, and fame. I frequently tell people that in the West it is difficult to be spiritual when you're wondering where your next meal will come from or how you will support your family.

If an eventual nine billion people all consumed materials at the rate of the average late-twentieth-century American, that would require an increase in worldwide steel production by a factor of five, copper by a factor of eight, and aluminum by a factor of nine.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.