Johann Georg Zimmermann Quotes

Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it creates more wants than it supplies.

Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow.

I am a weapon of massive consumption

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

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.

As human beings, we're very materialistic and have all this stuff - furs and cars and diamonds and money.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.

The love of Luxury grows by what it feeds upon.

I already own more than any human being needs.

I'm not materialistic. I love clothes and all that stuff, but I don't need it to live.

Many people in the western world are spoiled by the conveniences of our culture.

A lot of places think that bigger is better. It's like consumerism is taking everything over.

Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.

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

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.

A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.

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.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

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

It seems that we have been born only to consume and to consume, and when we can no longer consume, we have a feeling of frustration, and we suffer from poverty, and we are auto-marginalized.