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Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows...the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity...mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.
-Jean Baudrillard
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The best things in life aren't things.
-Art Buchwald
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Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
-Thomas Carlyle
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There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair.
-Frank A. Clark
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A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something.
-Harold Coffin
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It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.
-Robert A. Cook
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Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
-Guy Debord
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Powerful state and business elites seek to determine the basic framework of modern social goals: maximum economic growth generated by maximized corporate profit, fueled by mass production, fueled by mass consumerism.
-David Edwards
Burning all Illusions, pg10, South end Press
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The goals of corporate consumerism require that we accept its values, that we fail to seek better alternatives, that we reject the possibility of finding better alternatives ('psycho-babble'), that we fail even to see the existence of a problem to be solved, that we therefore live according to an entirely inadequate set of values, that we therefore live in complete confusion, that we therefore suffer profound and devastating psychological, physical and environmental disease; that we suffer and, if necessary, die for profit.
-David Edwards
Burning all Illusions, p216, South end Press
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Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
-E. M. Forster
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We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
-Erich Fromm
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The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
The New Industrial State 1967
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Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.
-Johann von Goethe
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Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.
-Oliver Goldsmith
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Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.
-Hesiod
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Materialism is the only form of distraction from true bliss.
-Doug Horton
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The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing.
-W. R. [William Ralph] Inge
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The essence of worldliness is exclusion of God.
-Henry Jacobsen
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When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
-William James
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Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
-John Maynard Keynes
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An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.
-David Korten
When corporations rule the World
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The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
-Herbert Marcuse
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Books about Consumerism
