Erma Bombeck Quotes

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

I don't keep up with the Joneses, I am the Joneses.

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.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

We are bred to compare ourselves to the next person, to what they have and what they have accomplished.

If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.

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.

At some point, extra incomes don't go to sate desires but to attempt to buy status through 'positional goods' - like the hottest car on the block. The problem is that there can only be one hottest car on the block.

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

There's peer pressure of not being respected of having a certain amount of money, but if you know who you are, then you see that and look past it.

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.

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

I have never been able to understand the compelling phrase, 'keeping up with the Joneses.' It does not matter very much whether I keep up with Tom Jones or anybody else; what is important is to keep up with myself by making my today a little better than my yesterday.

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.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

Many a family, in order to make a 'proper showing,' will commit itself for a larger and more expensive house than is needed, in an expensive neighborhood. Almost everyone would, it seems, like to keep up with the Joneses.

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.

I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.

I know it's not enjoying my success to do this, but when I see too many Polo shirts, I say to myself, 'That's the end of that.'

There is always going to be someone more successful, richer, better looking, or with a nicer car.

I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.

I'm sure that it's a universal experience, but I wonder if it gets exacerbated more in Los Angeles, where people are constantly looking over at the other people, going, 'Why don't I have that? I want that. Their table looks warmer.'

Some people work hard to be something that they're not, and I don't work at all, I'm just me. And that can bother anybody I'm not working nearly as hard as the other guys, and they don't like it.

Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.