Zhang Yimou Quotes

Bad shopping habits die hard.

With rising incomes, the share of expenditures for food products declines. The resulting shift in expenditures affects demand patterns and employment structures.

It feels so weird to be able to just kind of buy things when I want them or need them.

Credit or debit cards, for starters, are nothing short of shoppers' Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money, we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic.

Some say the economy means that you have to persuade people to invest in clothes - to buy less things but more expensive things. I disagree - invest in jewelry, or a house, maybe, but not in fashion.

It's a false assumption that people with a lot of money have a lot of free time to shop.

I believe in the dollar. Everything I earn, I spend!

I love to spend money.

Expenditures rise to meet income.

Human nature doesn't change. When enough people are comfortable enough financially, there is going to be human nature that wants to spend more money on better quality and, to some degree, status symbols as well.

I can't see myself ever spending hundreds of thousands on anything that doesn't come with a toilet.

In the old days I never thought about money - but then, of course, the clothes were so ugly in the '80s there was nothing I wanted.

Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.

If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

Expenditure--like ugliness and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

To be extravagant you need money. True. But you do not need your own money.

Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.

It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

Consumerism is our national religion.

When your economy is kind of ooching along, it's important to let people have more of their own money.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.

I would rather be a beggar and spend my money like a king, than be a king and spend money like a beggar.

If consumers don't have the wherewithal to spend because all the money's going to the top, and the people at the top only spend a very small fraction of what they earn, then the economy is almost inevitably destined to slow.