Robert Orben Quotes

I used to buy nice clothes and drive a nice car when I couldn't afford it. But I spent all my money doing it, and now I don't have to. I like nice things. I like to travel in a certain style. I like to live in a nice place.

I was brought up in an era when thrift was still considered a virtue.

We need to go back to the way it was 30 years ago, when everybody had Grandma and Grandpa, and we were willing to pass moral judgments about right and wrong.

I'd always rather be working - and you know what? My kids would rather me be working. If I stay at home, I'll only buy another car or spend their money.

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.

Rise before the elderly.

I do worry that we're failing in a whole bunch of fundamental ways to distinguish for our kids between needs and wants. And we're failing to distinguish between production and consumption.

I don't want my life to be about a house and a car.

If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.

If you stretch your imagination, I'll tell you all a tale, about a time when everything wasn't up for sale.

When I was an adolescent, I was obsessed with having many commercial things, cars, clothes, stupid things. Now that I have all that, I understand that the superfluous things can turn to you into a very stupid idiot-type. In East Germany there were very few things, but there was also a feeling of solidarity that no longer exists. Now we are up to the neck in consumption, the ego, the individualism. Now before friendship, it is merchandise.

I do feel kind of guilty sometimes 'cause, like, I could buy myself a $5,000 dress or a $3,000 dress, and I'm buying these things, but I'm knowing that my cousin need money for the rent. And then I gotta tell myself, 'Stop feeling guilty. You worked for this.'

I don't want to do too many films because I don't aspire to buy huge cars or build bungalows.

I am not the sort of person who will wake up and go and buy myself a Ferrari.

I am not a big fan of going to malls. I am pretty old-fashioned that way.

We’re living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We’d rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other.

When families bring children into the world, train them in faith and sound values, and teach them to contribute to society, they become a blessing in our world.

I was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.

Almost all men are over anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor and on they go as their fathers went before them till weary and sick at heart they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.

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

The family is the greatest treasure of any country. Let us all work to protect and strengthen this, the cornerstone of society.

Are you winning the battle against materialism?

When I was a kid, all of the parents and grandparents came out of the Depression Era. They were all freezing bread in their freezer, they were covering their sofas with plastic, and they had plastic runners on the floor. There was a great distance between them and anything authentic.

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.

I saw The Sound of Music again recently, and I loved it. Probably it's a more valuable film now than when it first came out, because some of the things it stood for have already disappeared. There's a kind of naive loveliness about it, and love goes by so fast ... love and music and happiness and family, that's what it's all about. I believe in these things. It would be awful not to, wouldn't it?