John Ruskin Quotes

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

Our fathers worshiped the golden calf. The worst you can say of an American now is, he worships the gold of the calf.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

I shop, therefore I am.

I've long been interested in looking at the culture of consumerism and also was interested in this connection between the American dream and the house, and the house being kind of the ultimate expression of self and success.

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Those who claim they are the prisoners of the laws of economics, only testify that they are prisoners of the idol.

Industrialization, by drawing people from the countryside to the cities brings with it the weakening of traditional political and social support systems.

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.

The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.

The building of the transcontinental railroads resulted in an orgy of political corruption. The public lands and the natural resources of coal, of iron, and of timber were lavishly wasted in the great scramble for wealth and material power. The carnival of waste and plunder reached its climax about 1890. Evidences were abundant that the great business interests of the country were controlling the government for their own private benefit. The capitalists who financed the railroads, mines, mills, packing houses, grain elevators, and other great enterprises, received from Congress favors which destroyed competition and enormously increased private fortunes.

The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars!

Commerce seems to be covering every aspect of our lives now. Which me, because I'm a romantic, is sad for me to say.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

God did not die; he was transformed into money