Quotes About Materialism

And yet, while there is only the one thing we can care for and devote ourselves to, we choose instead to care about and attach ourselves to a score of others: to our bodies, to our property, to our family, friends and slaves.

What are you going to get when you trade your freedom away? Check to see what your proud new possessions will be worth.

You can never get enough of what you don't really need.

You can never have enough of that which you don't need.

The astounding energy of post-menopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.

If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I? Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living.

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

Greed?has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.

Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEING HAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even people BEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

The absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known.

In the sphere of material things giving means being rich. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.

The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle.

Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion.

Do not set your heart on wealth…Do not strain to seek increase,What you have, let it suffice you.If riches come to you by theft,They will not stay the night with you….They made themselves wings like geese,And flew away to the sky.

La riqueza no se mide por las cosas que se poseen sino por aquellas de las que sabemos prescindir.

I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.

Fred was trying to preserve that special connection that children have with God, their absolute trust and acceptance, and at the same time, he was trying to loose their parents from the prison-house. For Fred, the prison-house included the "stuff" that we collect to fill up our lives, things like new cars and new houses that have left us empty as we've grown and matured into "adults" just like the ones the Little Prince met along the way.

Ellery made a mental note to buy Mike something really expensive and manly for Christmas. Like a tractor or truck nuts or a tool system made of adamantium

Now go bring back someone's head on the front of your Lexus for Mommy, okay?" She batted her eyelashes and he grinned, showing all his teeth. "It'll fit with the bullet holes through the trunk," he told her.

People have nannies and big cars, and they want to go to Maui for Christmas. When there are those kind of stakes involved, people get ruthless.