Geoff Mulgan Quotes

We live in an era of consumerism and it's all about desire-based consumerism and it has nothing to do with things we actually need.

If I like something, I get it and I put it on.

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

I write the shopping column. I think I've proven my superficiality.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

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.

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

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

Do I care about clothes and stuff? Not much. It's a bit sick, isn't it, people spending all that money on clothes? I'm too stingy. I wouldn't pay £100 for a shirt.

Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

Children have adopted a consumerist attitude - I dare you to entertain me.

The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

'Be comfortable with who you are', reads the headline on the Hush Puppies poster. Are they mad? If people were comfortable with who they were, they'd never buy any products except the ones they needed, and then where would the advertising industry be?

I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.

It's no secret that in our society, and many before, people are trend followers. For some reason, they feel better about themselves if they are dressed in the latest fashion or have the newest tech gadget.

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.

'The more expensive the better' is kind of the American way, and if you spent $600 for a sweatshirt, then that makes it better.

Philosophically, I don't like doing commercials.

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'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type; and then we live with the painful consequences.

Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty.

Practically everything from hairstyles to lifestyles is endorsed as some sort of drug to be taken Now for Instant Relief.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.