Kit Williams Quotes

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.

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.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.

Most of the things we buy are wants. And we call them needs, but they're wants.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

How many BMWs do you need? How many Rolex watches you gonna wear in your lifetime, for crying out loud? What is it about that kind of desire? I don't understand it.

No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.

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.

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.

Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.

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.

He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it creates more wants than it supplies.

We have a bad habit. We buy what we want and beg what we need.

Those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. […] We're used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.

Advertising creates and changes this foundation of all popular action, public sentiment, or public opinion. It is the most potent influence in adopting and changing the habits and modes of life, affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of the whole Nation. Formerly it was an axiom that competition was the life of trade. Under the methods of the present day it would seem to be more appropriate to say that advertising is the life of trade.

Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives.

Other than things like toothpaste, I don't buy anything that isn't sold to me.

Inordinate desire for material possessions can become an obsession that consumes our thoughts, drains our resources, and leads to unhappiness.

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.

An object should elicit desire, and often it happens not because people need it but because they love it.

People look at Instagram and say they want money, they want this, they want that.

I really believed it was important to explain to our young audience that expectations based on people who are trying to sell them things are unattainable.