Lisa Gansky Quotes

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.

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

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.

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.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives.

We're loving something to death in a way, which Americans tend to do a lot.

Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed.

I guess it could be said that the inspiration for 'Requiem for a Dream' is watching the American dream not only destroy so many lives in the U.S., but infect the rest of the world with its obsession with getting more, ignoring the deadly effect that has on the planet.

... 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?

We as Americans have ripped off the world. We get to throw food away. It's insane.

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

A lot of places think that bigger is better. It's like consumerism is taking everything over.

There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.

The idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently out of order with natural law.

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