Quotes About Materialism

Arlie Russell Hochschild resume "el daño colateral" fundamental causado en el curso de la invasion consumista en una expresion tan incisiva como sucinta: "la materialización del amor".

Al explorar el mercado en busca de artículos de consumo, son atraídos a los comercios con la promesa de que allí encontrarán las herramientas y materias primas que pueden (y deben) usar para volverse "aptos para el consumo", y por lo tanto cotizar en el mercado.

El anhelo reemplaza al deseo como fuerza motivadora del consumo.

Consumer freedom means orientation of life towards market-approved commodies and therefore precludes one crucial freedom: freedom from the market, freedom that means anything else but the choice between standard commercial products. Above all, consumer freedom successfully deflects aspirations of human liberty from communal affairs and the management of collective life.

Las grandes posesiones eran una señal o un indicio de una existencia protegida, bien consolidada, inmune a los futuros caprichos del destino: se les confiaba el cuidado de la vida de sus dueños contra los incontrolables caprichos del destino. Como la seguridad a largo plazo era un valor primordial y un objetivo prioritario, los bienes adquiridos no eran para consumo inmediato.

It is the turnover, not the volume of purchases, that measures success in the life of homo consumens.

I]n consumer culture choosing and freedom are two names of the same condition; and treating them as synonymous is correct at least in the sense that you can abstain from choosing only by at the same time surrendering your freedom.

A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty" to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world. "Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem—how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern. Nothing

Short is the way from need to greed.

ivory in the nineteenth century was a more rare and expensive version of what plastic is today

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another...

It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches; which, in their eye, is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.