Eric Hoffer Quotes

Men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.

Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow.

Luxury destroys more efficiently than war.

The necessities that exist are in general created by the superfluities that are enjoyed.

Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends

Most of the things we buy are wants. And we call them needs, but they're wants.

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

He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it creates more wants than it supplies.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

I already own more than any human being needs.

I'm not materialistic. I love clothes and all that stuff, but I don't need it to live.

I have more than 100 pairs of Jimmy Choos and I feel very guilty about it.

Ancient simplicity is gone...the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.

What pleasure can those over-happy persons know, who, from their affluence and luxury, always eat before they are hungry and drink before they are thirsty?

Poor is the man who desires a lot

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

Fashion is capitalism's favourite child.

I wasn't big in the party scene but I did have an excessive lifestyle. I had much more than I needed. I think that was a manifestation of a certain kind of mental illness.

In order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.

In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

Plenty is the original cause of many of our needs; and even the poverty, which is so frequent and distressful in civilized nations, proceeds often from that change of manners which opulence has produced. Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries; but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo - it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

All the auction houses care about is the selling of luxury goods.