Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

We live in a cult of the upgrade right now. There's always something around the corner that will make whatever you think is cool right now feel obsolete.

In the '70s and '80s, the mentality of America was that everything was disposable. The notion of quality wasn't important.

To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year

The idea that things should last just doesn't fit the economic model anymore.

Cheap electronics are not built to be repaired. They're just used and then discarded.

We suffer not from overproduction but from undercirculation. You have heard of technocracy. I wish I had those fellows for my competitors. I'd like to take the automobile it is said they predicted could be made now that would last fifty years. Even if never used, this automobile would not be worth anything except to a junkman in ten years, because of the changes in men's tastes and ideas. This desire for change is an inherent quality in human nature, so that the present generation must not try to crystallize the needs of the future ones.

Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.

I had one typewriter for 50 years, but I have bought seven computers in six years. I suppose that's why Bill Gates is rich, and Underwood is out of business.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence...we make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then the next year we deliberately introduce something that will make these products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete.

by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

As fast as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year...One is fear. The other is desire.

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles

Human nature is fond of novelty.

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.

Human nature is perpetual. In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Habit is the deepest law of human nature

The passion for sneakers has been there since day one, but I never held onto them. I never shrunkwrap them. It's always been about getting it, buying it, wearing it, showing it and moving on to the next one.

Most of us aren't crazy psychotics, but most of us are a whole bunch of different people. I think when you are in a position of authority, that doesn't remove that from you.

Men are ruled by toys.

The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There’s no such thing as intelligent vanity. It’s an instinct. And you’ll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination.

No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.