Nicholas Kristof Quotes

Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty.

I'm a slave to the culture, so I see an Audi, a Denali, or an Escalade, my neighbor got the four-door Porsche. I have a really nice truck. But it's a Durango and I like frontin'! I like to ride by and show off.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability.

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.

There are a lot of people on Instagram desperately trying to keep up with the Joneses.

People who have car collections - I never understood that. I always thought that was unnecessary. It's not beautiful, it's not creative. It's just showing how much money you've got.

I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

Some people just use beautiful things to just shop or to have a tribal feeling - 'Oh, blah, blah, blah, I'm wearing Hermes; blah, blah, blah, I'm wearing Saint Laurent; blah-blah blah' - because it's like a need, a tribe, recognition: 'Ahh, my Rolex.' But I run away from anything which is too recognizable - it's my nature.

There's always going to be someone with a bigger toy than yours.

Wealth has never been a sufficient source of honour in itself. It must be advertised, and the normal medium is obtrusively expensive.

We don't really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor's, and they're going on vacation that's slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand.

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz - My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, 'why don't I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,' and they abandon their values.

The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.

The media is convincing people that if you have that 'next thing,' that diamond, the right car, then you'd be happier.

It gets boring to me when people talk about clothing brands or what boat they're going to buy next summer.

I always say to my people, 'If you don't sell a Ferrari to a football player, you make a big present to me.' Really. Because they buy to just show off. I don't like.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

Possessing things is not that interesting. Living in a grand environment to show myself and others that I have wealth has zero appeal.

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.