Louis Kronenberger Quotes

At times, some journalists see nothing in the people apart from an opportunity to make material gain. They see them as consumers to whom we sell commodities at huge profits that keep our bank accounts growing.

When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.

You go to the airport and look at the bookstand, and you feel the titles are similar, the covers are similar, and you wonder how they can be different.

I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.

We live in a society where everything's packaged.

I worry a lot about people using games just for marketing, to get people to buy more stuff, which I think would be the worst possible use.

Marketing is the devil.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

As a fashion designer, I was always aware that I was not an artist, because I was creating something that was made to be sold, marketed, used, and ultimately discarded.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

There are always pluses and minus to commercialization. It broadcasts something to the masses. So that's the plus. The minus is it may lose some of its meaning if you dilute it.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

Let's face it, we're all clones nowadays. We've all got the same archives, we've all got the same Hyundai, we've all got the same Mac or PC components, and we're all being told the same news stories globally.

…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts, eating the same food. Everything is processed.

Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It's become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

George Orwell was right. There's no greater genius as far as I'm concerned in terms of understanding human nature. I think that a lot of people just believe anything you tell them, and no matter what it is, they just go along with the program. They're perfectly happy to take their pill every day and do what they're told, and work and buy things, and work and buy things, and stay out of any complex emotional situations. And whatever the authorities tell them to do, they do, and whatever the authorities say is the truth, they believe is the truth.

If you live in a world where the population is separating itself from science and entering an age of superstition, as a marketer, selling to people who will believe anything, it is a golden age.

You can argue about globalization and the many benefits it has had, but also you have to appeal to the mass with everything. The Chinese, the Americans, the Russians... Everything becomes this very bland product, and that's all we're producing at the moment. It's driven by money.

We're led by denial like lambs to slaughter, serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.