395 Quotes About Consumerism

The way Americans tend to buy things: A person who has $20 will buy something for $40 if it’s marked down from $100.

There were all manners of souvenirs and trinkets for sale when Ciro and Luigi disembarked from the ferry into the port of lower Manhattan. Signs advertising Sherman Turner cigars, Zilita Black tobacco, and Roisin's Doughnuts graced rolling carts selling Sally Dally Notions and Flowers by Yvonne Benne. The stands competed for the immigrant business. Ciro and Luigi came face to face with the engine of American life: You work, and then you spend.

The new politicians resembled hyenas and foxes. In both hemispheres, the people quickly forgot. Compassion and rage shared the fate of autumn flowers, upon which settles hoarfrost: they had faded, withered, then died under the weight of rent, prices, inflation, soap operas and talk shows, family life, victories and defeats in stadiums.

We see all of these things that we can never buy, all of these places we can never go, all of these people we can never touch or love or be.

These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.

Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.

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.

Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers--ugly. No! I don't want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.

Page: Don't keep the world on tenterhooks, Tom! Out with it! What's the best thing we can do to ensure a long, happy, healthy future for mankind? Grey: We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on-in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we've been doing for the past half century-if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species. Page: Follow that if you can, Mr. President.