Jonathan Carroll Quotes

I love getting stuff, and if I give a present to someone and don't get one back, you can bet your life they won't be getting one next year.

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.

They say kids today don't know the value of a dollar. They certainly do know the value of a dollar. That's why they ask for five.

Owning things is an obsession in our culture. If we own it, we feel we can control it; and if we control it, we feel it will give us more pleasure. The idea is an illusion.

How many times have you bought something thinking it would make you happy, and found it does not?

A gift isn't a gift unless it has meaning. Just giving things to people, especially children, create the expectation of more things.

To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!

The 1960s was probably the first time in history that young people were recognized as a big group of consumers and as a commercial proposition for Madison Avenue. Advertising played a major role in creating the ethos of that era - the idea that, "Here it is, and you can have it now." I know that many kids thought that the ethos of the 1960s was due to their own peculiar virtues, but, in fact, it had a lot to do with the realities of the marketplace and commerce.

...thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness?

She's as plastic as you are. If you ever have kids, they'll come out of the birth canal with Fisher-Price stamped on their butts.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

The land of milk and honey, they say it is the land of money.

....I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.

We are taught to want a thing. We are taught that having that thing will make us happy. We are taught that having it immediately is the answer. We are taught a corrupted version of success. And love.

Labels want to capture a certain market of kids and blah blah blah, and it's true, I just never think about that stuff. It's all part of a chain that's moving along, but this phase of music has to switch.

Our basic fundamental desires are overly stimulated. A friend of mine said, "you have a generation of people that have been accidentally marketed to."

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.

Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury - or at least comfort - so there's a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.

People like to own things.

Scheme not to make what's Another's your own; Be not a Dog for the sake of a Bone.

Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner.

The covetous person lives as if the world were made altogether for him, and not he for the world.

For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.

That's exactly the reason I'm leaving RCR because you've got those punk-ass kids coming up. They've got no respect for what they do in this sport and they've had everything fed to them with a spoon.