Quotes About Materialism

Our society's drive for the "Great American Dream" has become a nightmare! It keeps many potential moral supporters lulled in a stupor of spiritual inactivity.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money.

It's the outside world that's the prison. The outside world of jobs and cars and cell phones and apartments and grocery stores. Appropriate clothing, plans for a Saturday night, loneliness.

She loathed Christmas, and she loathed the run-up to Christmas, the frenzied shoppers, the tat in the shops, the lights that were put up too early in the streets, the Christmas songs that belted out from overheated shops day after day, the catalogues that poured through her door and into her bin, and above all the insistence on the value of family. Frieda did not value her family and they did not value Frieda. A great gulf lay between them, impassable. The

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them.

you almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.

At root fame is a sham. I'm not going to live forever and if I am I certainly need don't you to tell me that so that I will buy a car or a box of dried up crackers.

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world's future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities—it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Opinions, customs, institutions, cities—everything has become vulgar, since we gave up repairing the old in order to buy every day some gaudy novelty.

Replacing the concrete sense perception of the object with its abstract intellectual construction makes man gain the world and lose his soul.

Idéologie de l'homme moderne: acheter le plus d'objets possibles; réaliser le plus de voyages possibles; copuler le plus grand nombre de fois possible.

Reeducating man will consist of teaching him once again to value objects correctly: that is, to need few.

The cultural standard of an intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

I thought that somehow your life would be much different when you're famous... and it's not. You just buy more stuff.

When your life is possession-centered, the important thing is what you have; when it is principle-centered, the important thing is who and what you are.

There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like.

Marx's main interest was in economic relationships since in his view they shape everything that we are and can become.

but what he liked above everything else was a cheque. "It is a thing," he used to say, "to which it is not easy to find an equivalent; it requires no food, it does not take up much room, it stays in one's pocket, and if it falls, it is not broken.

But Doug had the same clichéd overreaction to wealth that defined most bearded men his age.

You confuse our higher and lower functions, harnessing our drives and motivating us down an unnatural path, one in which human beings are reprogrammed to covet products and ignore reality.