Consumerism Quotes

We have too quickly bought into the lie that we’ll be happier with more—and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less.

~ Joshua Becker

Life punishes those who have things in abundance by making them worry about petty things like: what to wear, or, which car to drive.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Don’t obsess over having the 'latest' version of a product. For there was a time that the previous version was the latest.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Marketing's illusive promise is that this one product will change your life, make you feel more sexy, satisfy all your heart's desires.

~ L.g. Durand

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The different strategies and visions of ‘reformists’ and ‘radicals’ are not the only subject of major debate within lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer politics. The fact is that only a tiny minority of non-heterosexuals are involved in any sort of political activism. Various writers and activists have noted with rising alarm an almost mass depoliticisation of lesbian and gay communities in the 1990s. The crass commercialism of the gay scene and the rise of the so-called pink pound and of ‘lifestyle’ as a signifier of sexual identity (and human worth) has allowed huge profits to be reaped. Playing on the insecurities of people sells ‘packages’ which can include everything from ‘gay apartments’ to ‘gay holidays’ and ‘gay clothes’ to designer drugs.

~ Richard Dunphy

With a beaming face celebrate the joyful day and rest not therein. For no one can take away his goods with him. Yea, no one returns again, who has gone hence.

~ Anonymous

I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Celestine. There are so many blogs and articles in the 'Living' sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Celestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings.

~ David Cronenberg

Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street.

~ Susan Ee

If you are not content today, there is nothing you can buy tomorrow to change that.

~ Joshua Becker

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

~ David Mitchell

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

~ Angela Carter

Escape is a commodity like anything else

~ Iain Banks

If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.

~ Noam Chomsky

Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to their beliefs, should be the basis for the construction of any object created by humanity become immediately absurd once we analyze all the object being manufactured today. A fork or a bed cannot come to be considered necessary for humanity's life and health, and yet retain a relative value.They are 'learned necessities.' Modern human beings are suffocating under necessities like televisions, refrigerators, etc. And in the process making it impossible to live their real lives. Obviously we are not against modern technology, but we are against any notion of the absolute necessity of objects, to the point even of doubting their real utility.'Asger Jorn

~ Tom Mcdonough