Quotes About Materialism

Buying and selling, that's all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence.

The standards of beauty in America's über-culture are purposefully set too high so that we will buy anything in our frantic scramble to become attractive. We are meant to feel crushed, inadequate, and less-than so that we'll buy more and more things in the vain hope of fixing ourselves.

I scrambled to pack my things, glad I owned so little.

And he told himself, reader, that it was the cloth that he desired and not the light.

Life had given her nothing but money, a poor gift

Intoxicated as he was with the heavens, he could not imagine needing anything on earth.

Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.

Well, first murder, then shopping.

The student asks: If my redstone necklace had every view of every veil that ever brightened, would I be wise? The master answers: If I had a thousand pieces of a priceless vase, would I be rich?

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things . When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things , can you?

What about my clothes?" Corey said. "Those are hand-me-downs Travis wouldn't want, all things considered," I said. "Your mom just took things that were important to you. Things to remember you by." "But it's only been three days," Corey said. "Mom isn't like that. Hell, she spent four months talking about buying a new sofa and another two shopping for it before deciding to stick with the one we had.

You're the one who doesn't understand, Lev said. In America, I have my own car. There's more food than you can eat, all the booze I want, all the cigarettes I can smoke. I have five suits! What's the point in having five suits? Grigori said in frustration. It's like having five beds. You can only use one at a time!

Los biberones eran un lujo que escaseaba más que las grabadoras. —Gracias

The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.

It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

We have turned away from the natural world. Instead, it's all about money and power.

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be.

What we enjoy, not what we possess, is ours, and in labouring for the possession of many things, we lose the power to enjoy the best.

When money disappears, we soon understand the power of absence.

There is power in ambition, pleasure in luxury...but envy can gain nothing but vexation.

We are at best but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of liberality to content it.