Quotes About Materialism

Grown-ups always seem to be worried about money, or politics, or just stuff that has physical presence. It's like somewhere along the way they lost the ability to think about what's inside them.

Instead of opportunities for serious accomplishment in our culture, we supply our children with expensive toys, hoping that these will occupy them and keep them from disturbing us.

Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness, possesses you. And in this materialistic age, a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.

Unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens. If you have them, you have to take care of them! There is great freedom in simplicity of living. It is those who have enough but not too much who are the happiest.

possessions.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The

Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.

They have possessions without power, wealth without true worship, and prosperity without God's presence!

When your eyes are on prosperity, they are moved away from the parousia, a Greek word for the Lord's coming

Being rich, really rich, meant you could go completely crazy, and the only result would be everyone getting so jealous they couldn't stand it.

Gold we've got, humping we want – debauch! debauch!

Goriot was "a grease spot in his daughters' drawing rooms." Once they squeezed the money out of him he's discarded "like a lemon peel" in the gutter. The moral drawn by the Duchesse: "Society is a mudhole. Let's try to remain up on the heights.

I've always been after the trappings of great luxury. But all I've got hold of are the trappings of great poverty. I've got hold of the wrong load of trappings, and a rotten load they are too, ones I could have very well done without.

All right, You Great Git, You've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even You'll be ashamed of Yourself! No wonder You've so few friends. You're unbelievable!

Economics is dead, and true equality will rise out of the ashes. We've turned our back on materialism, rejected it completely. It has no purpose anymore. Now we can live as we please, develop our minds not our finances.

Things and riches of this world aren't evil in themselves; what is evil is that we USE people to love THINGS instead of using THINGS to love PEOPLE.

We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not.

Junk food, junk religion, and junk products just leads to excessive numbers of junk people living junk lifestyles.

Better to own a little that is dear to you than have all the potato fields of Sa Pobla.

And there you will serve man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell.

You saw the abominations and idols among them made of wood and stone, of silver and gold.

or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver.

and consign your gold to the dust and the gold of Ophir to the stones of the ravines,

Though he heaps up silver like dust and piles up a wardrobe like clay,