Consumerism Quotes
Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites. - William Ruckelshaus
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. - Mahatma Gandhi
U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks. - Unknown
Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money. - Author Unknown
Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world. - Pam Shaw
You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy. - Eric Hoffer
You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need. - Vernon Howard
The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. - Mad Magazine
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. - Henry David Thoreau
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. - John Berger
Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system. - Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970
To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year. - Elwyn Brooks White
I may be a pessimist, but the philosophy of anti-thrift just now coming into being seems to me the greatest danger to the peace of the world. - Adriano Tilgher
There must be more to life than having everything! - Maurice Sendak
Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion. - Ambrose Bierce
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. - From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
He who buys what he does not need steals from himself. - Author Unknown
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. - Unknown
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. - Edward Abbey
The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more. - Kin Hubbard
In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea. - Richard Bach
Forethought and temperance are the virtues which produced thrift, and with thrift the economic progress of society. And those are the virtues which today are gravely compromised. - Adriano Tilgher
Who covets more, is evermore a slave. - Robert Herrick
By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.-Ellen Willis
I condemn the national gay press for its emphasis on consumerism.-Harry Hay
In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance.-Wim Wenders
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.-Christopher Lasch
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.-Christopher Lasch
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.-Christopher Lasch
My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.-Bill Bryson
My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.-Christian Bale
Pop culture is not about depth. It's about marketing, supply and demand, consumerism.-Trevor Dunn
The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.-Ben Nicholson
The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.-Christopher Lasch
Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.-Edward Bond
We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.-Emma Thompson