Pete Buttigieg Quotes

We're very good in America at talking about stuff, often stuff to buy. We tend to talk about our iPods. We tend to talk about cars or new fads.

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.

Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.

I'm an American except when I'm in the supermarket or at the candy store.

We're not living in a school-of-Paris world, you know, and the things we really see in America are like this. It's McDonald's, it's not Le Corbusier.

I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.

It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.

Americans are used to being pandered to and spoon-fed everything. In a culture that needs caffeine-free cherry chocolate diet Coke, you'd best deliver information with entertainment.

The mall is good for hearing new music because you hear music everywhere. I like to walk around the mall and hear what the kids are listening to, or what's the feel of Middle America, cause that's what the mall is.

If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.

Shopping and buying and getting and having comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing.

When you travel, specifically for our show, you get inspired by rest stops, Cracker Barrel. Middle-America people are perfect.

I was in the shopping mall because that's where I go lately. For the last couple of weeks, I've been going there every day, trying to figure out why people go there. It's kind of a personal project.

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.

I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.

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...

My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.

Pop art is a way of liking things.

The habits of the West in terms of consumption.