Johann Johannsson Quotes

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

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

Magazines and advertising are flogging the idea that you have to keep changing things and get something new. I think that's balls - evil. But obviously that's your livelihood.

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

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

Going to a junkyard is a sobering experience. There you can see the ultimate destination of almost everything we desired.

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.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end..

The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

The fundamental dogma of Modernism - that, if the past is irrelevant to the future, then today is irrelevant to tomorrow - has created a throwaway society of disposable objects. That is sick.

Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill.

It's always consoling to know that today's Christmas gifts are tomorrow's garage sales.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

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

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.