C. S. Lewis Quotes

Not everything in the United States is for sale.

Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

Fashion is capitalism's favourite child.

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

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

Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today.

I never strike out at any life form. The only things I attack are icons of conspicuous consumption. People put objects in front of their life, in front of anything that has real importance. They make this 'thing' their God.

We have an imbalance over how much we produce relative to how much we consume.

We define poverty as a shortage of material goods, which justifies the production of more and more material goods. It does not occur to us that it might be more realistic to regard it as an aberrant situation in which more material goods are required than can actually be produced, for then the solution would be to create those socio-economic conditions in which less goods rather than more were required.

Democracy, and man-made laws in general, correlate closely with consumer culture.

The market is not an invention of capitalism …. It is an invention of civilization.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production.

The difficulty lies, not in finding a producer, but in finding a consumer.

These days malls are the cathedrals of the modern world, and old buildings that had character are gone to allow for econo-worship and peso-pilgrimages.

... idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy in which man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

We live in a society that, for the most part, is morally and spiritually bankrupt. Our culture is a culture of consumerism. How sustainable is that?