Quotes About Materialism

Women love money. Give 'em a couple thousand bucks and they are happy.

You'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes and sell his body for soap.

Man as an Idea in neoplatonist religion is again an abstraction, less a monster and more a bad joke. The religious idea of man is of a bodiless being who works to undo his flesh, deny his appetites, and to rise above the ordinary requirements of the body. This abstraction has a horror of the material world as a kind of fatal allure seeking to corrupt his soul. But no man finds himself more beset by lust than the man who tries to deny he is a man.

Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

Shopping eased the pain. -Hailey, Retail Therapy

Mas o fato é que não é possível acumular coisa alguma. O acumular é uma ilusão. Por isso Deus chamou o rico de insensato.

Our culture promotes an endless need for fulfillment to always want what the next guy has, even though the effort might kill us.

The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.

Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world.

America isn't young, you know. It's ancient and evil. With aluminum siding.

what about the material stuff that keeps us fed and housed? And what about our attention and our priorities? As we pray into our lifestyle, we encounter the issue of materialism. What is it that holds our attention—God or stuff? —Daniel Wolpert, Creating a Life with God

MOST PEOPLE'S IDEA OF WEALTH RELIES SOLELY ON HOW OTHER PEOPLE SEE THEM.

Some people are so poor, all they have is money.

I think we've been dulled by capitalism. We're just blobs now - we're so worried about how we can keep paying the lease on the car, the mortgage, the lease on the toaster and all that. You can't really think about much else. If you lose that, you lose the whole lot.

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.

I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17

the very word for matter is derived from the same root as mother-in Latin, the corresponding words are materia and matet-and (as discussed in Chapter 3), the whole ethos of materialism is permeated with maternal metaphors.

Worse still, what future have a people whose schooling has enabled them, at best, to ascertain the price of everything—but the value of nothing?

Roepke was no apologist for an abstraction called "capitalism"—a Marxist term, incidentally, foolishly pinned to themselves by numerous vainglorious champions of economic competition. He knew that the worship of Mammon is damnable.

Those were his exact words, "an insatiable lust for power and money".

Are we moving from a society where we ask "Why rent when you can buy?" to a society where we ask "Why own when you can rent by the hour?"

The development of contemporary consumer societies has had a profound effect on the way we view the world. Stated most simply, we have come to regard an increasing profusion of both natural and human-produced things as objects to be desired, acquired, savored, and possessed.

If possessions are viewed as part of self, it follows that an unintentional loss of possessions should be regarded as a loss or lessening of self.

We cannot hope to understand consumer behavior without first gaining some understanding of the meanings that consumers attach to possessions. A key to understanding what possessions mean is recognizing that, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves.