Quotes About Materialism

Money," says my mother, "can buy everything but a fever.

But a lot you care when all you can think of is your fine Yehupetz ladies. They should gash themselves on their diamonds and bleed to death!

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. (Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street.

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life.

Kita tidak bisa menghindari kesan bahwa manusia umumnya menggunakan standar yang keliru. Mereka mencari kekuatan, sukses, dan kekayaan untuk diri mereka sendiri, memuji diri mereka sendiri di hadapan orang lain dan mereka memandang rendah pada apa yang sebenarnya berharga dalam hidup.

Making money does not seem to me a very elevating ambition

Mais même au XIX siècle elles étaient souvent obligées de se cacher; elles n'avaient pas même 'une chambre à elles', c'est-à-dire qu'elles ne jouissaient pas de cette indépendance matérielle qui est une des conditions nécessaires de la liberté intérieure.

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.

The petit-bourgeois temperament prefers the cosy picture of a slow, uninterrupted and endless progress. In both cases, the material growth of the party becomes the sole criterion by which to measure the good and the bad of all things. It is exactly as if the party were a head of cattle to be fattened, and as if the universe was created for its fattening

Toda la publicidad, toda la propaganda, tan variada en sus formas, que busca excitar el deseo de lo superfluo, tanto en el campo como entre los obreros, debe ser considerada un crimen.

we are always entertaining the delusion that we will go on forever in this world. The result is that the very things which ought to be of assistance to us in our pilgrimage through life, become chains which bind us.

Such experiences can make us bewail how the Western world gives itself over annually to its Claus-mass or commerce-mass. We celebrate a reworked pagan Saturnalia of epic proportions, one in which the only connection with the incarnation is semantic. Santa is worshiped, not the Savior; pilgrims go to the stores with credit cards, not to the manger with gifts. It is the feast of indulgence, not of the incarnation.

Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!

There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.

I just wish people wouldn't quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Why had he ever gone abroad? It had unsettled him. He had been bored in Paris, yet he liked crepes Susette better than flapjacks; he liked leaning over the bridges of the Seine better than walking on Sixth Avenue; and he couldn't, just now, be very excited about the new fenders for the Revelation car. How was it that this America, which had been so surely and comfortably in his hand, had slipped away?

As he watched her sleeping, under wretched and insufficient blankets, in the cold nights which swooped down after the panting sun-drenched days, his dry heart blossomed in tenderness. . . . To think that he had once esteemed people because they understood Goossens's music or James Joyce's fiction, because they wore sleek clothes and were clever at the use of forks, because they could set up wooden words as a barricade against roaring life!

Fiindc? nici o n?scocire rea n-a încolÈ›it în sufletul omului mai repede ca banul

When I shop, the world gets better, and the world is better, but then it's not, and I need to do it again. (Confessions of a Shopaholic-the movie)

We're all to driven by materialism. Obsessed with success. With money. With trying to impress people who'll never be impressed.

There are some things I don't understand about Jess and never will. No wedding dress. No flowers. No photo album. No champagne. The only thing she got out of her wedding was a husband. (I mean, obviously the husband is the main point when you get married. Absolutely. That goes without saying. But still, not even a new pair of shoes?)