Michel Gondry Quotes

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.

There are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.

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.

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.

Our culture is a capitalist society right? And so in order to always have the idea of the good life, means something you pay money for. Think of being outside of what you have and own, it always has to be receiving a difference.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

Buying is more American than thinking, and I'm as American as they come.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

In America the biggest is the best.

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.

There are a lot of things to get seduced by in America.

I feel like this whole idea of wanting something that you don't really have is also very American in a way.

Warhol was questioning the capitalist society.

Shopmas now begins on Thanksgiving Day. Apparently, escaping the families you cannot stand to spend another minute with on Thanksgiving Day to go buy them gifts is how some Americans show their affection for one another. Weird.

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.

Everyone's life is for sale in America.

Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything including the irresponsible quest of thrills; so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama.

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

What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.

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.

Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.

But even our pleasures are calculated and business like. We measure our enjoyments by the sum expended. Our salons are often little better than bazaars of fashion.

We can all do better. America is an entrepreneurial society. We had entrepreneurs who started our country. And they want us to think in fresh, new, different ways all of the time.