John Twelve Hawks Quotes

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

We all think we're liberated when we have more of everything, don't we? That's what the media tell us.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry.

I formulated the theme behind 'The Grand Illusion' album after observing how American culture creates illusions through advertising and entertainment to convince us that our lives our lacking, in order to sell products.

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.

The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.

We are hurtling towards self-destruction at an alarming rate thanks chiefly to an advertising and propaganda system that goads people from infancy towards apathy, isolation, passivity, helplessness and separation.

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want.

New pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as conspicuous elements of the American character.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.

I've also been documenting an unsustainable way of life. And you see in peoples' stories that this world of consumerism does not support the moral and spiritual values - of family and community - that people feel are most important. From an environmental perspective, the quest for more and more is not going to be possible on this planet. This is a historical documentation of an unsustainable path, and my hope is that this work allows people to think about their own agency and the potential for change.

Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction.

I am a weapon of massive consumption

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.

Polls are the corporate media's standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.

Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton.

They Want You To Be A Docile Apathetic Consumer

Pay no attention to pop culture, for it is what poisons our minds and divides our children. Materialism promotes negative values and egotism. Eliminate all of it. It is the plague of Big Business.

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.