Quotes About Materialism

Recycling has been little more than a comforting distraction from the stuff that really matters.

Atheists must make a positive case that only material things exist. That's why instead of debating "Does God exist?" I prefer to debate the question "What better explains reality: atheism or theism?

Forgeries are an ever-changing portrait of human desires. Each society, each generation, fakes the things it covets most

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

It is of course quite a different matter when a seeker, no longer satisfied with materialism or dogma and yearning for spiritual nourishment, asks an initiate for advice and enlightenment. In such an instance the initiate is duty bound to enlighten the seeker in accordance with his perceptive faculties. The magician should spare neither time nor effort to communicate his spiritual treasures to the seeker and lead him towards the light.

This passage indicates the step that Feuerbach has taken from idealism to materialism. He formulates the new thesis with a precision that points forward to Marx, when he says that it is not thought which determines being but, on the contrary, social being which determines the consciousness of men.

So humanity is not the helpless plaything of a dead mechanism, but its development consists precisely in the growing power of the human mind over the dead mechanism of nature. But - and this is only said by historical materialism - the human spirit develops from, with and out of the material mode of production. The human mind is not the father of the mode of production, but the mode of production is the mother of the human mind.

A system that has only one goal, the maximization of profits in an endless quest for the accumulation of capital on an ever-ending scale, and which thus seeks to transform every single thing on earth into a community with a price, is a system that is soulless; it can never have a soul, never be green. It can never stand still, but is driven to manipulate and fabricate whims and wants in order to grow and sell more... forever. Nothing is allowed to stand in its path.

We are...so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.

Sometimes I think that all mankind exist but to be bought and sold: The rich man's paramour is gold, the poor man's goddess, gold, gold, gold.

We're all idealists, all materialists; and the final judgment or label is simply a matter of ideology, or, if you prefer, of political commitment.

Kapitalisme lanjut memperdagangkan banyak hal yang dulunya tidak dianggap sebagai komoditas.

From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself.

My dear countrymen, I hope that you will live to see the day when you learn to believe in other gods than a few movie whores and a couple of prize-fighters.

According to Buddhist philosophy, nothing ever really belongs to you. Even so, you can still give stuff away.

The things that others have always seem better than what you have

Un hombre encuentra una sola moneda en el barro y habla de ello durante días, pero cuando le llega una herencia y es un uno por ciento menor de lo que esperaba, entonces se sentirá estafado.

When has any man ever been content with what he has?

Jean Kilbourne's book, Can't Buy My Love,

In so many ways, she was the luckiest person in the world—someone who didn't have to worry about money, someone who lived in a beautiful, exclusive area others paid a fortune to visit, someone who cared about the library and felt a great sense of purpose—and yet...something was missing. Her life wasn't nearly as idyllic as others probably saw it.

It is our nasty twentieth-century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul.

In our society, where money, power, and pleasure are the name of the game, the body truth is bleeding from thousand wounds.

Many consumerist economies stay afloat by manipulating the low self-esteem of their consumers and by creating spiritual expectations through material means.