Quotes about consumerism

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anyone in the world. We're all such products.

"The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy."

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

A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. (p. 39)

Let’s have a toast—to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!

Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to overconsume.

Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it...

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

But we rarely taste the real thing. The vanilla flavoring we buy in the spice section of grocery stores, the vanilla we find in most of our ice creams, cakes, yogurts, and other foods, as well as in shampoos and perfumes, is an artificial flavor created in laboratories and mixed with alcohol and other ingredients. Marshall McLuhan once warned us that we were drifting so far away from the real taste of life that we had begun to prefer artificiality, and were becoming content with eating the menu descriptions rather than the food.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.