Patti Smith Quotes

In the '70s and '80s, the mentality of America was that everything was disposable. The notion of quality wasn't important.

I think part of the reason ideas haven't come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It's experienced and then forgotten.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

Pop culture's gotten much more disposable.

I think we're in a disposable world and 'Stairway to Heaven' is one of the things that hasn't quite been thrown away yet.

The idea that things should last just doesn't fit the economic model anymore.

The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

Cheap electronics are not built to be repaired. They're just used and then discarded.

When you buy something for $9.99, and you know that it'll fall apart after you wear it once... you're going into the shopping experience knowing that you're renting. So all I'm doing is making the rental process more efficient.

The fundamental dogma of Modernism - that, if the past is irrelevant to the future, then today is irrelevant to tomorrow - has created a throwaway society of disposable objects. That is sick.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

Fashion is very quick. It's very disposable. It's immediately - it tells you exactly where we are in our culture, especially women's fashion.

The next step after cheap is free, and after free is disposable.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

My songs are like Bic razors. For fun, for modern consumption. You listen to it, like it, discard it, then on to the next. Disposable pop.

I am tired of spending a little bit of money in a lot of pieces because they keep on falling apart.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a 'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

America is a very venal place; everything has to be sold there. You can repackage your own s**t and sell it if it is marketed in the right way. The motivation is to sell. It's so illogical and strange to me. It's such a disposable culture and yet I feel comfortable being American.

I only started to understand the concept of "environmental protection" 14 years ago. I was an ambassador for a charity event, and the staff told me that the consumption of disposable chopsticks in China, per year, could result in the devastation of unimaginable acres of forest.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

So rather than really have, like a close relationship to anything that's coming out today, people are just, they've got it on as background music. It's kind of the same way the cabdrivers use music; it's very disposable. But, that doesn't mean there aren't a great number of artists who are doing things to change that.

If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.