Quotes About Materialism

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible.This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes,will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. (P. 125)

Oil painting, before anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.

One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

Decent fall the clothsover a high income.

We live in the shadow of a great lie, and by the time we figure out that it is a lie we are closing in on death and have become irrelevant consumers, and a new generation of young and relevant consumers takes our place in the great chain of shopping.

It's simply not the case that secular liberalism, grounded in materialist utilitarianism, is the inevitable and default worldview of anyone who isn't stupid, brainwashed, or uneducated;

acquiring money for its own sake can become an addiction if you're not careful—

You know Chad's definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year's model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?

It beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where 'tis kept is lighter than vanity.

The gentleman's name was Mr. Worldly-Wise-Man.

The man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

Welcome to American capitalism. It's a great system, except that no one ever has enough.

The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.

The miserable think that what they have is never enough. Like the Little Mermaid, who owned no more than twenty thingamabobs, they say, "But who cares, no big deal, I want MORE." (How could you be miserable with twenty thingamabobs?)

Oh, seriously--how could you be miserable with twenty thingamabobs AND a snarfblat?!

The materialist philosophy says that in a godless world all we need do to overthrow the laws of economics and the limits of human nature is shed enough blood and make enough sacrifices of other innocent people, and the mouths of endless cornucopias will be opened. You cannot make an omelet without a genocide of innocent eggs, and without Walter Duranty to get a Pulitzer for lying his ass off about it.

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.