Quotes About Materialism

Money is a form of alchemy, [...] it turns kind, normal people into greed-mongers, intent only on acquisitiveness.

You are the stuff of which consumer profiles – American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model – are made. When you're staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn't it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?

What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.

If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.

But the object cannot be allowed to escape from ephemerality or from fashion.

Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation.

She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes.

I wanted to escape from the cynical attitude of life where an action was deplored only when it did not bring material advantage.

It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?

Your husband certainly love money,' she said. 'That is no lie Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

El centro comercial no es nuestro verdadero hogar, ni un espacio público, aunque, a medida que desaparecen las librerías, los jardines, los parques, los museos y los polideportivos, la falsa amabilidad de los centros comerciales sea el único espacio que queda para muchos, aparte de las calles.

It hasn't been too fashionable to talk about the soul. We live in a material world. Religion is discredited as superstition or, worse, fundamentalism. Spirituality, even when detached from religion, looks a bit hippy, wooly, vague; a comfort-zone for those who can't quite manage life as a biological and chemical accident with miraculous consequences.

Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.

Luxury] corrupts both rich and poor, the rich by having it and the poor by wanting it.

Je suis moins tenté de l'argent que des choses, parce qu'entre l'argent et la possession désirée il y a toujours un intermédiaire ; au lieu qu'entre la chose même et sa jouissance il n'y en a point.

We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Claus myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, Dad said, you'll still have your stars.

We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, Dad said, you'll still have your stars.

I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart...

But Mom, I said. that ring could get us a lot of food. That's true, Mom said, but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food.

What a torment it is not to be rich! It gets one into such abject situations.

All these objects... how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked the to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve.

Revolutionary man must be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, entirely immersed in the society that oppresses him, but capable of transcending this society by his effort to change it. Idealism mystifies him in that it binds him by rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to devise roads of his own. But materialism also mystifies him, by depriving him of his freedom. The revolutionary philosophy must be a philosophy of transcendence.