Selected consumerism quotes

1. I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

2. I'll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N' ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!!

3. Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.

4. As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

5. Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.

6. Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?

7. By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

8. Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

9. Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

10. Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.

11. As we drive down the freeways, we see the new cars, but not the massive new-car loans that enslave their drivers to the banks.

12. Ah! American cigarettes are like the American soul - sweet and light.

13. The American people are sheep. They're comfortable, rich, working. It's like the Romans, they're happy with bread and their spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to them than any right.

14. People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

15. In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.

16. There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

17. If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

18. Do you guys have to sell everything? I'd like to buy the Earth's core.

19. Bargain... anything a customer thinks a store is losing money on.

20. There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

21. All advertising advertises advertising.

22. I am tired of hotels promising to go the extra mile only to have them refuse to go round the corner!

23. I never put on a pair of shoes until I've worn them at least five years.

24. Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, 'How many things I have no need of!'

25. If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

26. The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

27. The ad in the paper said 'Big Sale. Last Week.' Why advertise? I already missed it. They're just rubbing it in.

28. How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

29. An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

30. Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath.

31. The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes.

32. If a man smiles all the time, he's probably selling something that doesn't work.

33. Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

34. There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.

35. Actors didn't use to be celebrities. A hundred years ago, they put the theaters next to the brothels. Actors were poor. Celebrities used to be kings and queens. Then the United States abolished monarchy, and now there's this coming together of show business and celebrity. I don't think it's healthy. I don't want to sound self-important, but all these celebrity shows and magazines - it comes from us, from Hollywood, from our country. We're the ones creating it. And I think it works in close step with a lot of other bad things that are happening in the world. It promotes greed, it promotes being selfish and it promotes this ladder, where you're a better person if you have more money. It's not at all about the work itself. Don't get me wrong. I love movies. But this myth of celebrity has nothing to do with movies.

36. 'I got confused. I thought it was a K.Y. scare, so I bought 2000 jars of personal lubricant. I still have some.'

37. Those big-shot writers ... could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.

38. All right, you great git, you've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even you'll be ashamed of yourself! No wonder you've so few friends; you're unbelievable!

39. Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.

40. I went to a general store, but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.

41. In fact, just take a look at the history of 'trucking and bartering' itself; look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you'll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken - conscious efforts - to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there's a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manifacture wants in the general population. It's happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It's very dramatic too at cases like these. For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica - which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, 'It's not paying anymore.' So within a couple of years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called 'free' economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same - and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we've got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slave have to become the happy workers - somehow we've got to work it all out. Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn't want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, 'How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they're no longer enslaved into it?' Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn't really want a lot of things - they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate - the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn't then desire, so then the only way they'd be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations. There was very conscious discussion of the need to create wants - and in fact, extensive efforts were then undertaken to do exactly what they do on T.V. today: to create wants, to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don't really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society. And that pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism. In fact, what the whole history of capitalism shows is that people have had to be driven into situations which are then claimed to be their nature. But if the history of capitalism shows anything, it shows it's not their nature, that they've had to be forced into it, and that that effort has had to be maintained right until this day.

42. The Thames and the Mersey, the Tyne and the Wear and the Clyde They spew slums like gravy on the banks of the poisonous tide What became of the working class? Nike, Reebok, Adidas Scratchcards, pitbulls, ecstasy Hooray for the 21st Century

43. You take a kid that has Playstation 2, a RAZR scooter, DVD players, his own computer...what a candyass.

44. A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

45. There are two distinct types of bike: The one your save up for and buy yourself, otherwise known as the 'Dream Machine' , and the one your parents buy for you, otherwise known as the 'Complete waste of space'.

46. If Western firms pay developing countries' suppliers' starvation wages in order to feed the West's ever increasing consumer demand, can we call that 'partnership'?

47. With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

48. I don't care how stylish something is if it doesn't flatter me.

49. Too many people today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

50. A stylized version of our Ikea present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

51. Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

52. Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

53. 'You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete - whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it's all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You're glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn't a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it's a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.'

54. Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that - the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives.

55. 'Maybe Christmas', he thought, 'doesn't come from a store.' 'Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!'

56. The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.

57. Cynicism is cheap-you can buy it at any Monoprix store-it's built into all poor-quality goods.

58. When I heard about Hair, I was kind of curious about the six naked primates on stage. So I called up the box office and they said tickets were $11 apiece. That's an awful price to pay. I went into the bathroom at home and took off all my clothes and looked in the mirror for five minutes. And I said, 'This isn't worth $11.'

59. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

60. 'We'll buy a lot of clothes when we don't really need 'em/Things we buy to cover up what's inside/Cause they make us hate ourself and love they wealth.'

61. 'Over here is the drug trade we die for drugs/ Over there they die from what we buy from drugs'

62. I get guilty when I spend money on silly things like clothes and stuff... Having experienced a completely different extreme of wealth, and I don't mean me being poor or rich, I mean knowing that 40 quid that gets spent on a pair of shoes could go a long way for a family in Georgia for a week or even a month, having experienced that, you're a bit more [guilty].

63. Once you get over the fallacy of the convenience of modern-day life, living more ethically becomes a liberating antidote to the live-to-work consumer culture.

64. Travellers, George, must pay in all places: the only difference is, that in good inns, you pay dearly for your luxuries, and in bad inns you are fleeced and starved.

65. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

66. Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!

67. There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

68. I don't have techno-fear, I have techno-JOY! I love technology! I love to get a new machine. Every time I get a new machine, I think, 'This is the one! I won't have to work again; I've got THIS thing!' And if you have techno-joy, you get the instructions, you unwrap it, and you throw the instructions out the window! [mimes doing so] Forget them! Fuck 'em! [mimes turning on a computer] On. [mimes typing] I must know how this works, I've used machines before! [nonsense sound-effect singing] Come on... come on... come on... This bit comes off, I think. [mimes breaking something on the computer] And then you smash it with a hammer! [mimes doing so] I get really fucked off with the machines.

69. Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates

70. A Handbag?!