Gil Scott-Heron Quotes

The way you dress or the car you drive or what you spend is to impress other people with how, I guess, successful and rich you are. But you're not, and you shouldn't, and who gives a damn what other people think anyway. So, that mentality, I think, is very destructive.

Now most of 'Alice' isn't really a political social commentary, but I think a big message is here is that the culture we're involved in is fascinated with very quick fixes and instant gratification.

Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.

I think we're all hooked, I feel my own hook-ness on immediate gratification you know. I want what I want.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

There are a lot of things to get seduced by in America.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

Everyone wants instant gratification: you have to have everything your parents had right away.

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

I think we live in a culture that is actually hedging all of it towards comfort and immediacy, things that scare me. All the things that they sell us as a way of life scare me.

We always want more. Whether it is better clothes, a bigger house, faster cars, or the latest gadgets, satisfaction in these days of consumerism is difficult to find.

Hot today, forgotten tomorrow. I'm not buying anything.

Now that I have the access and money, I spend all of it on clothes and shoes. I have no other pursuits. I don't drink or smoke.

When money becomes more important than any other standard, then we're all in trouble.

God forbid that the day should ever come when, in the American mind, the thought of man as a consumer shall submerge the old American thought of man as a creature of God, endowed with unalienable rights.

People have material needs, but you don't need a deodorant for every different day of the week. You don't need four hundred varieties of mustard. This is what I call too many choices. There are too many choices in America.

It is odd to watch with what feverish ardour Americans pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they might not have chosen the shortest route to get it. They cleave to the things of this world as if assured they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they expected to stop living before relishing them. Death steps in, in the end, and stops them, before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them.

The only thing that matters is here and the only thing that matters is now. And America's inability to delay gratification is because we do not have eternal thinking.

I walked inside Macy’s and faced the pathetic spectacle of a department store full of shoppers, none of whom were shopping for themselves. Without the instant gratification of a self-aimed purchase, everyone walked around in the tactical stupor of the financially obligated.

To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright

The trouble with the new world we have watched being created over the past decade is that it sees no further than money. People have always been obsessed with money, of course - greed is as old as history. But when the institutions that govern all our lives forget there was ever anything else, then it gets dangerous.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don't know what wine istheir uglinesstheir pink sausage skin, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin,... the world as an Americanized vacuumtheir fake health, their fake youthfulnessthe way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death.

It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness.