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

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but...

Marketing’s illusive promise is that this one product will change your life, make you feel more sexy, satisfy all your heart’s desires.

If you can’t reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an...

A customer facing crucial decisions: What should I wipe myself with? What should I brush with? His personal hygiene was deteriorating rapidly as he stared at the rows of possibilities, sweating profusely. Would he ever...

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

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...

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call “maximising utility”. The ultimate objective of mankind...

On ne peut pas tout avoir. Et puis d’abord où le mettrait-on?

In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it’s just the perceptions that...

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this...

The faster you go, the idler you get.

It’s simple,’ Kat told them. ‘You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working with the gap between reality...

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it’s at. “Pro-maternity” propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern...

The problem with Marxism is the proletariat isn’t going to rise up against capitalism and consumerism. The only time they’ll rise up is during a commercial break to either go to the bathroom or grab...

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do...

Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want.

Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of...