395 Quotes About Consumerism

I'm just an actor. My performance is not more important than your life. Stop watching. We're false images designed to sell you products by exploiting your insecurities. To make you spectators in life, not participants.

A consumerism credo is a poor substitute for liberty, human dignity, and personal integrity; pursing a hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle proved spiritually enslaving. Rather than pointing its aim at raising the moral consciousness of individual persons and our community, consumerism gives its blessing to basking in wanton self-indulgence

For every dollar spent on luxuries, someone somewhere goes hungry.

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

You can't rage against the machine through rebellious consumption.

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest, to make money they don't want, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like.

Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago.

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers, buying more bits and pieces—two or more cars, two homes and all that fills them—and outfitting one's body for a wide variety of identities: business person, homebody, amateur athlete, traveler, theater or sports fan. Things exercise a certain tyranny over us.