Quotes About Materialism

When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.

Albeit urgent and overdue, black political power proved to be no antidote to the giant triplets. Racial tensions underlay the low-intensity war between Detroit and its predominantly white suburbs, which became the new base of support for Reagan's militaristic rhetoric. And even as the wealth evaporated in Detroit, materialist aspirations drove a new wave of violence and alienation in city and suburb alike.

As Grace recounts in the pages that follow, Detroit's history is embedded with struggles that expose the contradictions inherent in the golden age. However, the city's deep despair further reminds us that, over the past four decades, the U.S. public has largely evaded responsibility for confronting the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism.

It is because people live in the things they possess instead of in their relationship to God that God seems at times to be cruel.

When I seek him, root my values and desires in him, when I found my relationships and sense of self on him, my capacity for joy increases. The more I "have" Jesus, the deeper my enjoyment of him. He increases my desire for those things that are good, adds value to that which is benign, and diminishes the strength of the negative (the evil) that threatens to throttle me. My dependence on material values and experiences as the means by which I define or please myself decreases.

Of course, if you accept the materialist belief that memories can be created only if the brain is functioning, then that will be your conclusion. But that's exactly the point in question: whether mental functions like perception and memory can occur without the brain.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough…. We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Driving a brand new car feels like riding around in an open billfold with the dollars flapping by your ears as they fly out the window.

Las clases media y alta viven ahora tan protegidas, su existencia tan controlada, que carecen de cicatrices. Y a falta de cicatrices se tatúan. También por eso la ropa nueva que compran está rota y con desgaste simulado, como si hubiese sido usada por años en trabajos rudos. A estas generaciones les faltan heridas, calle, golpes».

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender "lonely crowds.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

The more you consume the less you live

I try to remember, as I hear about friends getting engaged, that it's not about the ring and it's not about the wedding. It's a grave thing, getting married. And it's easy to get swept up in the wrong things.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society. Again, before healing may begin, men must acknowledge the reality of what lies within. Among those confusing emotions is a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as companion, model and support, and a deep hunger for the fathers as a source of wisdom, solace and inspiration.

I've owned a thousand houses that I've never built, she said. Never had the money to build. Couldn't have used if I had had the money. Never really wanted to build maybe. But I still own the houses.--Karen Holmes in From Here To Eternity

What did it proft a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul?

money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire.

If he set out right now to make a list of the things he had taken for granted in his life, he'd go broke buying paper.

I'd have everything money could buy, but it wouldn't be the same as having everything i wanted. Not even close

You know, if you love something, you should love it regardless of whether it costs five dollars or 500 or 5,000 dollars. Unfortunately, that's not the way our culture works, and we do collectively buy into this idea that things that are more expensive probably have more value.

Unhappiness isn't just the result of genetics or past trauma or career trouble. I think that some of our unhappiness is simply due to the burden of all our things.