Quotations about Consumerism
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi
..."Madison Avenue," that mythical advertising copy writer who is supposed to persuade us to wallow in cosmetics and
Among all the other "Days," why not have a "Bunkless Day" — one day in the year entirely free from sales, advertising or promotion ballyhoo? Give the dear public a chance to come up for air! ~J. W. Cunningham (1881–1971), Corn on the Cob, 1952 [This line may have been first published as early as the 1930s, in a Toledo, Ohio newspaper.
The last few centuries have seen a mad scramble for recognition by commercial and dominating industrial interests... [T]oday industrialism and commercialism are enthroned Molochs, demanding worship and, at times, human sacrifice. ~William Armstrong Fairburn, Mentality and Freedom, 1917
The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is—the world we live in.
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.
~D. H. Lawrence, "Wages," Pansies, 1929
Love your life, poor as it is... The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace... Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts... It is life near the bone where it is sweetest... Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. ~Henry David Thoreau
To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. ~E. B. White, 1954
MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion. ~Ambrose Bierce
Our incurable instinct to acquire... ~Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), diary, 1950, translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden, Markings, 1964
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. ~Edward Abbey
Let's live with that small pittance that we have;
Who covets more is evermore a slave.
~Robert Herrick
We realize we can't have everything, and so begins the mad scramble to have everything else. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com