395 Quotes About Consumerism

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Greed is self-preservation in action - it is selfishness in action. So to treat greed, we must treat selfishness.

Why do you think Apple can become the first trillion dollar company in history, not because they can innovate, but because they can abuse the shallowness and vanity of the masses.

Consumption kept the workers working, which kept the paychecks coming, which kept the people spending, which kept the investors investing, which meant there was more to consume. The system, properly understood, was independent of values and needed no philosophy to prop it up. It was a perfect circle, complete in itself - and empty in the middle.

Living as a slave to unchecked personal desire and subjugated to external circumstances is wearisome. It is a common error to devote a person’s life to earning money. While money relives us from the stress of suffering from deprivation, moneymaking will not make us happy. A person must have passion in life in order to achieve any degree of personal bliss.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.

Escape is a commodity like anything else

Now, it so happens that our culture—or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis—places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture’s emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself.