Quotes About Materialism

It doesn't matter about money; having it, not having it. Or having clothes, or not having them. You're still left alone with yourself in the end.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

The War was just as busily studying the purpose of The Economy, which is to cause people to purchase what they do not need or do not want, and to receive patiently what they did not expect.

Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, and our dwelling places to consumption.

Oh, it ain't mine. I don't own anything I can't carry or that won't follow me when I whistle.

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

We haven't accepted—we can't really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

That detestable product of the folly of our fore-fathers—a feather-bed.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

Democritus (460-360 B.C.)— in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.

Materialism is like a grammar that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter.

Bracelets, necklaces, anklets, finger-rings and ear-rings made the women of Sumeria, as recently in America, show-windows of their husbands' prosperity.10

IV. IS MAN A MACHINE? Yes, said Julien Offroy de La Mettrie.

To the eyes of a miser a guinea is more beautiful than the sun.

Since all the Riches of this World May be gifts from the Devil and Earthly Kings, I should suspect that I worship'd the Devil If I thank'd my God for Worldly things.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.

El dinero no vale nada; lo que te compras sí.

Cash is filling up the holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet and hard to work. He could cut up a tin can and hide the holes and nobody wouldn't know the difference. Wouldn't mind, anyway. I have seen him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it was glass he was working, when he could have reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and drove them into the joint and made it do.

That's what money will buy you, in America," Brown had said, firmly. "People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?" "Why?" asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown's part. "Because they have better stuff," Brown had replied. "No other reason.

the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.

People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?" "Why?" asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown's part. "Because they have better stuff," Brown had replied. "No other reason.