A balanced dieT to make you die with a tea, consists of holding two bags of cookies on each hand and a voracious hunger to consume.

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from...

La historia no ha cambiado. Hace mil anos ellos eran los duenos del mundo. Hoy en dia lo siguen siendo. Claro, lo tienen que compartir con los grandes magnates de la tierra, esos que controlan...

If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.

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.

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

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many...

I own nothing, but at least nothing owns me. Well, besides the bank.

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same...

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.

Now, sorcery rules the world. Of course, most don’t call it sorcery; indeed, many would be horrified by such a notion. Instead, they use words like ideology, politics, defence, security, patriotism, commerce, industry, marketing, consumerism...

We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us…And this is understandable given the workings...

The decadent artist markets other people’s pain

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is...

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We...

The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.”(Analects 4.16)

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

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

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of...

In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume in stead of our freedom to find our place in the world.

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and...

Deciding we won’t drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers’ market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in...

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.

Whom one is speaking to – or which aspect of their character – fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. ‘Indulge Your Desires’ comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than...

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are...

It wasn’t some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in...

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

Little people doing little things in little places everywhere can change the world.

In a lot of ways that poor little potato’ – Evan pointed directly at Jade’s French fries – ‘symbolizes the reckless consumerism that plagues America.

It is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages…. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed… to be...

Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that’s lacking breaks – a swarm of...

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity,...

People buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

I buy the most expensive trash bags, and the lowest quality products to consume and throw away. As a lover, I’m always thinking about the end user.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to...

We no longer live life. We consume it.

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.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them….Long after he’s dead, someone else...

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a...

If everyone wanted peace as much as they want a new iPhone, then there would be peace.

The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try...

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Who talks about values, morals, and truth in all this? Nobody! There are just no outlets that can speak through all the noise! Between television, the internet, college campus, bars, parties, and work hours, there...

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an “urban Thoreau”) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of “work, produce, consume, work,...

Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film – another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that...

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV...

Americans used to be ‘citizens.’ Now we are ‘consumers.

Escape is a consumer goods like another