Books like Twilight are not art. They are mass-produced crap that is meant to be consumed by the widest possible audience, for the largest possible profit.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain,...

According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.

natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place...

If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism–the single greatest source of its waning morality–I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains...

Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things....

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

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was “Plenty.”Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely....

I want it all and I want it now.” A whole culture is being infantilised.

Once employed, the employed’s friends are reduced to creatures that he only sees when he has a new problem, or, something new to show off.

The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’...

Consumerism, the new black. I want my burger my way. Shaken not stirred. Sauce on the side and rare but not rare rare. Venti, two-pump, sugar-free vanilla, non-fat, two Splenda, extra-hot, extra-whip, extra-mocha Mocha and...

The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard.School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob’s glass and other merchandise. Jacob...

Just because everyone CAN publish a book these days, doesn’t mean everyone SHOULD. The world doesn’t need 1000 knock-offs of 50 Shades of Grey. I’m not so sure the world even needed ONE 50 Shades...

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...

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

By using repetition, images, and other strategies – all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional – marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer...

A broke man’s lover doesn’t feel ‘loved’ on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine’s Day.

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to...

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.

…those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as ‘creative’ adventure, leisure,...

If doctors are paid the same salary as bus drivers, community would not be crazy about making their children doctors

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...

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money...

Awards represent achievement, and to an extent they show more about who you are as a person than the personal items you picked out and purchased, because they show desire, ambition, goals, and accomplishment.

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control–what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature....

The more people have time to experience the joys of creativity, the less they will be consumers, especially of mass-produced culture. I see that as a kind of new wealth that counts for more than...

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the...

To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.

Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have ‘a dream’ sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.

We typically misunderstand what’s wrong about consumerism. It’s not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must...

We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the...

Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed...

Un barril de petróleo equivalía a 159 litros y se vendía en ese momento a unos 100 dólares, unas 600 coronas o unos 76 euros. Ese barril de petróleo suministraba por sí solo tanta energía...

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid.

After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and – above all – its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything – and everyone – is...

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest – on behalf of the senses and the microbes – against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a...

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back...

We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.

A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”(Analects 4.9)

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance —...

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

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental...

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

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most...

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

For myself, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and...

What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn’t work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and...