125 Consumerism Quotes

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

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!!

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton - well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

I do not read advertisements - I would spend all my time wanting things

I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said,'Forget everything you know about slipcovers.' So I did. And it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, and I didn't know what the hell they were.

'Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing, but absolutely nothing, can make you happy. The moment you see that you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another. None of these things, can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure that initially grows in intensity then turns into pain if you lose them and into boredom if you keep them.'

When I purchase a food item at the supermarket, I can be confident that the label will state how much riboflavin is in it. The United States government requires this, and for a good reason, which is: I have no idea. I don't even know what riboflavin is. I do know I eat a lot of it. For example, I often start the day with a hearty Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tart, which has, according to the label, a riboflavin rating of 10 percent. I assume this means that 10 percent of the Pop-Tart is riboflavin. Maybe it's the red stuff in the middle. Anyway, I'm hoping riboflavin is a good thing; if it turns out that it's a bad thing, like 'riboflavin' is the Latin word for 'cockroach pus,' then I am definitely in trouble.

Anyone who steals a shoe is a poser.

Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as 'a cheerful, child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.' Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric. Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings?

Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams - Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.

The sponsor of an hour's television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or 'letting the public decide.'

The Cuban people refuse to be forced into consumerism, and for that we are the most democratic nation on the planet!

The kind of doorhandles which is recessed a little bit into the door and your fingers actually go in a little before they actually grab it. Don't you like that? I like that. That's why they're not going to make it anymore. They found out we liked that.

We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile.

'End of the world! They stopped making my Adidas! How crushing. I'm just going to wear Wonder Bread bags on my feet now.'

I have experienced as violence the emergence of the culture of compulsory industrialised joy, which is the companion of consumerism.

Musically, my dream is to do what Norah Jones did. I can't play the piano, but to sit next to it and just sing.

The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is: it's not only sad. It's devastating. It's devastating because routine language means routine thought. And it means unquestioning thought. It means if I can't - if new words cannot occur to me and new image does not occur to me, then what I'm doing is I'm simply repeating what I've heard. And what we hear from an overpowering cultural force and the forces of homogenization, what we hear is sell, sell, buy, buy. That's it. That is the function.

You can't trust the quality any more...

In America you can ease into middle age with the accoutrements of adolescence still prominent and suffer relatively minor embarrassment: okay, so the guy's still got his sideburns and rod and beer and beergut and wife and three kids and a duplex and never grew up. So what? You're not supposed to grow up in America. You're supposed to consume. But in Britain it seems there is some ideal, no, some dry river one is expected to ford, so you can enter that sedate bubble where you raise a family, contributing in your small way to your society and keep your mouth shut. Until you get old, that is, when you can become an 'eccentric' - do and say outrageous things, naughty things, because it's expected of you, you've crossed to the other mirror of the telescope of childhood.

But what would become of mass production and its system of financial expansion if technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction. The very condition for current financial success - constantly expanding production and replacement - works against these ends. To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.

Television has thrown in the towel. It rarely even pays lip service to its once brave mission to educate and illuminate. Instead it gives us what we want, in much the same vein as the doctors who handed out Valium like Smarties to desperate Sixties housewives.

We are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next years model.

[on the greatest invention] Liquid Prell.

'We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes...' (pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?

Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, welcome! Your great country [of China] makes our Happy Meals possible!

(a few minutes later) I bought one of those little glass ball things with the snow in it... Just checking.

'Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish.'

I sued Taco Bell 'Cause I ate half a million Chalupas And I got fat! I sued Panasonic They never said I shouldn't use their microwave To dry off my cat!

Poppycock religion is America's new faith. It is easy. It is quick. I allows a person to feel spiritual, seem intellectual, have a faith to follow, and have something interesting to talk about over cofee. Poppycock is the quick-fix diet of the spiritual industry. It sells. It rarely threatens or confronts the seeker, allowing each to forge his own individual 'religion.' The poppycock believer changes the rules as he goes. If he misses a basket, he will say that a missd basket is still worth two points. The poppycock believer does not serve his god, rather his god serves him. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Let's say, for instance, I'm out of cheese. And then I'll think, oh, but what if I go to the store and they're out of cheese? I'd be like, 'How can you be out of cheese?' 'What do you mean 'How can we be out of cheese?' You're out of cheese. People run out of cheese.' Then I'd be like, 'Yeah, but you're a store. You should have cheese stocked up in the back for people like me coming in looking for cheese.' And that's when they send the manager over, who thinks he's so cool for being the manager 'cause his picture's framed in the front of the store 'cause he's the manager, you know. And he'd be like, 'What seems to be the problem, ma'am?' Which to me is so condescending, like 'little lady.' I'd be like, 'The little lady's problem.:' He'd be like, 'Who's the little lady?' I'd be like, 'Shut up and listen to me. You're out of cheese and I want some.' And, he's like, 'Well, how about some cottage cheese?' Like he's going to negotiate the situation, he's a diplomat because he's the manager. And I'd be like, 'I don't want cottage cheese; I want cheddar cheese. Sharp cheddar cheese is what I came in for. Sharp cheddar cheese and cottage cheese are not the same things. Just 'cause they have the name cheese in the title doesn't make it a cheese at all. That'd be like going into a musical instrument store and saying 'I'd like to buy a trumpet,' and them saying 'I'm sorry, we're all out of trumpets, but would you like a shoehorn?' See, that's not the same thing, is it, Mr. Manager?' ('Thank you for the shoe horn,' you know.) And he starts getting all nervous and everything, because a crowd has formed and he starts feeling humiliated because they're all sitting around mumbling 'What seems to be the problem?,' I don't know, she wants some cheese.' And, so, um, he just slaps me right across the face. And, umm, so that's when Skip, the part time guy who works there, who hates the manager 'cause he thinks so cool for being the manager and treats Skip like shit because he's just the part time guy. And Skip's going to quit in the fall and go back to school anyway. He doesn't even need the money; he's from a wealthy family. He's just doing it for the experience because his family wants him to work one summer. And, so anyway, so, he takes the hose, and he goes to spray the manager right in the eye, right, and so, but that's when he's leaning down to pick the cottage cheese, so he misses him and he gets this old woman who's standing right behind him, and she's there picking out an avocado, because the older you are the less you eat and she all she wants is the avocado. So she screams out, 'my eye, I've been sprayed in the eye with a produce hose.' And so then that's when her nephew who's visiting from Austin Texas is two aisles over buying tortilla chips because he thinks they're going to have guacamole. Little does he know it's one avocado. And so, he starts running 'I'll help you, aunt so and so,' running, and then when he's running down the aisle when he slips on some water from the produce hose, breaks his leg, breaks his arm, bruises two ribs right there: gets a stitch put in his cheekbone, just one, but still, it's a stitch. Chaos breaks out and it's all over Hard Copy and Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood: 'Lesbian Demands Cheese, Causes Riot.' And I'm like, 'I didn't even want the cheese.' You know?

The number one reason people hate America: the number one reason is because of our religion. Americans worship money, we worship money. Separate God from school, separate God from work, separate God from government, but on your money it says in God we trust. All my life I've been looking for God, and He's right in my pocket. Americans worship money, and we all go to the same church, the church of ATM. Everywhere you look there's a new branch popping up : remind you about how much money you got and how much money you don't got. And if you got less than twenty dollars, the machine won't even talk to you. The machine is like, 'You better go see a teller.' You ever go to a teller and try to take out eight dollars and fifty cents? Oh, it's disgusting : oh man, you gotta wait on that long ass line, people doing real transactions in front of you, you get on to the fucking front, you fill out your form, eight fifty. The fucking teller looks at it, she look at you, she looks at the check, she don't even take the money out of the drawer, she take it out of her pocket, 'Here you go, get outta here.' And here's something, man. Drugs are illegal, but ATM machines are open twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-four hours a day. For who? Who the fuck is it open for? Have you ever taken out three hundred dollars at four o'clock in the morning for something positive? Shit, when you press that machine at four o'clock in the morning, I think a psychiatrist should pop up on the screen and go, 'Come on, man, save your money, man. Don't buy drugs, buy some rims. They spinning, nigger, they spinning, they spinning, nigger, they spinning.' Americans worship money. Shit, you know why banks are closed on Sunday? 'Cause if they wasn't, church would be empty.

Did you see my painting? I got it from Target

Yes, we're lazy. Yet we also can't seem to sit still. So we've started making things like GO-GURT. That's yogurt for people on the go. Let me ask you, was there a big mobility problem with yogurt before? How time-consuming was it, really? [pretending to be on the phone:] 'Hello?...Oh, hi, Tom...oh, I've been dying to see that movie...Umm, no...I just opened up some yogurt...Yeah, I'm in for the night...No, not even later-it's the kind with fruit on the bottom. Well, have fun. Thanks anyway.'

B-U-Y Centennial Sell 'em pre-canned laughter America Perennial Sing happy ever after

Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. 'I have never belonged to this race,' said Rimbaud.

Ignorance of people purchasing diamonds and necklaces And barely able to keep the payments up on their lessons and enrolled in a class and don't know who the professor is how low people go for the dough and make a mess of things?* ~ Shout

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.

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

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

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

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'.

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'?

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?

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

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

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.

Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

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.

'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.'

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.

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

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.

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

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.'

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.

'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.'

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

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].

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.

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.

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