J. G. Ballard Quotes

Children's television has been grossly over-commercialized. The subtle message is, "Buy me! Buy me!

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Children have adopted a consumerist attitude - I dare you to entertain me.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.

Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives-bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures.

China’s educational system has fed the country’s youth a steady diet of patriotism to ward off rebellious thoughts. But such measures appear almost redundant since many young Chinese seem more interested in buying i-phones and Louis Vuitton products than in fighting for democratic change.

I'm caught up probably just as much in the consumer culture as the next person.

Ads sway kids' preferences. Star athletes spokespeople sway kids' preference.

Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives.

The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects.

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.

Of course we'd rather not see Picasso teacups and sheets.

When I started modeling, all I really wanted to get was a Shabby Chic couch.

I really believed it was important to explain to our young audience that expectations based on people who are trying to sell them things are unattainable.

I look about my house and see there are lots of lovely things in it, but I constantly buy more.

The promotional environment is part of the world we live in.

Consumerism is the reason Christmas has morphed into a hollow shopping ritual that leaves too many families with debt hangovers and an empty feeling inside.

I feel the world is over-saturated with products, and it isn't about what you're wearing as much as it is about what message you are trying to convey.

If somebody else wanted to do a song for McDonald's, that's up to them. I wouldn't do something like that, but whatever.

I don't like ads: I'm too susceptible. I find myself in the supermarket buying Ronseal, and I don't even have a shed.

Commercialism in the Western world has got us by the scruff of the neck. It's a technological takeover, and we can't even see it happening because we're too busy enjoying it.