Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.

Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

People surround themselves in their houses with things they don't really need, that they have to dust all the time.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

Here's how I see obesity: as a symptom. The larger problem is over-consumption. In a society that identifies consumption with patriotism, valorizes 'growth' above all else and assigns status according to how much you consume, we compete with each other to see who can consume the most.

People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

I am a weapon of massive consumption

We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.

It seems that we have been born only to consume and to consume, and when we can no longer consume, we have a feeling of frustration, and we suffer from poverty, and we are auto-marginalized.

The habits of the West in terms of consumption.

Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.