Quotes About Materialism

We're loving something to death in a way, which Americans tend to do a lot.

Our affluence has allowed us to move to a place where we tend to make things pleasurable, as opposed to efficient.

We must be aware of consumerism! That's our tendency. It's the capitalistic curse that we were poisoned with. We should spend only what is necessary. How do you call the big cars, the latest ones? Hummer! Not a single dollar to import Hummers! What is that? What is that? What kind of revolution is this? One of Hummers? No way!

Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about.

Today's average American is more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedom.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

The '90s and early 2000s were the 'I' decade. iPhone, the iPod - everything was about me. Look where that got us? In a terrible recession.

Advances don't fundamentally interest me. It sounds terribly naive, but money doesn't really mean anything to me. If a lot of money came my way, I'm certainly not going to say no. But it hasn't come my way as yet, and I'm not heartbroken.

I just find that you can become a very boring person living in L.A. I tell you, living there on a day-to-day basis is vacuous: terribly fake.

I thought I'd lost a pair of earrings once. They were, like, $50,000. I was terrified.

Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume.

You earn millions hosting a hit TV show. You've got a wicked house by the beach, your car does two hundred miles per hour and your girlfriend is a model. I officially bloody hate you.

Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

Jesus said: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth', 'Love not the world nor the things of the world', 'Woe unto you that are rich--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.' Yet all these self-styled'Followers' of Christ made the accumulation of money the principal business of their lives.

One of the Buddha's main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more.

Porque él no le dio a su carne, que tan poco viviría, ni un traje decente, ni una alegría que lo reconciliara con el vivir, él no había hecho nada por el placer de su materia, mientras que a su espíritu no le fue negada ni la geografía de los países para quienes los hombres aún no han descubierto maquinas para llegar.

cuando el comercio se muestra en su desnudez espantosa. Las cortinas metálicas tienen rigideces agresivas

No podré tener más ilusiones. A los otros hombres los mueve alguna ilusión. Unos creen que tener dinero los hará felices, y trabajan como bestias para acumular oro. Y así los sorprende la muerte. Otros creen que con el poder serán dichosos. Y cuando les llega al poder, la sensibilidad para gustarlo se les hizo pedazos entre todas las bellaqueríasque ejecutaron para conseguir el poder

Above all, we have to remember, Marx is greedy. He wants more of everything. He is suspicious of quality unless it is simply the mark of greater quantity: even if quality could exist alone, it would always be less admirable than a quantity in continual prospect of increase.

They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down.

In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition.

Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That's hard for scientists, brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.