Quotes About Materialism

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.

They want what they don't need, or can't use, or won't ever make them whole.

There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have. A day don't go by that there's not war somewhere in this world. A war to end all wars? That's like saying a disease to end all diseases. Only way that'll happen is when every human being on this earth is dead.

There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have.

it attempts to show that the necessary conditions of logical and mathematical reasoning, which undergird the natural sciences as a human activity, require the rejection of all broadly materialist worldviews. Reppert

He shared Erica's contempt for all those who tried to fill their holes in such places, all those who felt the key to life was getting enough money to frequent better and more exclusive versions of the very same crapholes. They had sentenced themselves to the chain gang, toiling under the reflective glasses of banker guards as they worked the road in an endless bulimic slog of earning and spending, acquiring, devouring, vomiting up the excess just so they could devour more.

I think that money it is the goal of cowards. Money is what you end up wanting if you don't have putz enough to stand up and decide for yourself. Money is what they want you to want so that you will work for them every day of your life and buy what they sell and fill your house and your soul with their junk. It is for those without the courage to decide for themselves.

You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism.

Well, yes,when you no longer have any desire, you are dead. Even desire for a product, a consumer item, is better than no desire at all. Desire for a camera, for instance, even a cheap one, a tawdry one, is enough to keep death at bay." a wicked smile, an inhale of the cigarette with those lips. "If the desire is real, of course.

She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

Basil Pennington suggests that the core of the false self is the belief that my value depends on what I have, what I can do and what others think of me.

Anybody who thinks money will make you happy, hasn't got money.

Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and immediately assess them only in terms of what he could get for them in the market? Surely, he can only have been a thief.

The source of status is no longer the ability to make things but simply the ability to purchase them.

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.

Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx's supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.

Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.

The thing about Walmart was that even a man like Dwayne Brewer could go unnoticed. People pushed their buggies with dead-eyed stares, everything sliding by in the periphery. Consumerism scaled this large had a way of camouflaging class.

more money doesn't mean more better. It just means more.

Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.