J. B. Priestley Quotes

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

I will go out of my way to avoid the shopping crowds and the extreme consumerism - I hate all that.

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.

We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life; but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.

Advertising prods people into wanting more and better things. Of course advertising makes people dissatisfied with what they have - makes them raise their sights. Mighty good thing it does. Nothing could be worse for the United States than 200,000,000 satisfied Americans.

As businessmen caught a glimpse of the potentialities inherent in endlessly expanding the wants of people under consumerism, forced draft or otherwise, many began to see blue skies... What was needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers-and strategies that would provide products assuring such wastefulness. Even where wastefulness was not involved, additional strategies were needed that would induce the public to consume at ever-higher levels.

Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. 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.

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton.

I just saw an ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was this woman-and I think it's degrading to womankind-she was going out of her mind over a new product called "A Thousand Flushes." Here she was in her toilet, saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and, "My life is complete!" Good God-if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're sick!

We're all subject to the daily pressures of consumer persuasion.

The insanity of consumption bothers me. Talk about the opiate of the masses. It ain't religion anymore. It's stuff.

No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.

It doesn't take an incredible manner of analysis to reveal that our primary desires are incessantly stimulated to keep us basic consumers.

The necessities that exist are in general created by the superfluities that are enjoyed.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Let's be honest, this is a consumer based economy in America. That's all we manufacture here is need and appetite. We are the world's mouth. They make things in other countries, and they're like, 'Send it to America; they'll eat it.'

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

I've also been documenting an unsustainable way of life. And you see in peoples' stories that this world of consumerism does not support the moral and spiritual values - of family and community - that people feel are most important. From an environmental perspective, the quest for more and more is not going to be possible on this planet. This is a historical documentation of an unsustainable path, and my hope is that this work allows people to think about their own agency and the potential for change.

Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction.

I am a weapon of massive consumption