Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement!

I think we live in a culture that is actually hedging all of it towards comfort and immediacy, things that scare me. All the things that they sell us as a way of life scare me.

Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.

We inhabit a world where we're taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it - the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

People have become shallower. They view spending, entertaining, seeking leisure and enjoying as the main objectives of their life.

When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

I miss the common things, the things that used to really annoy me, like an alarm clock. The sound of your zipper as your fly is being pulled up so that you know it actually is up. The sound of the door as it closes, to know that it's really shut.

We live in such a self-gratifying nation, and everything is instantaneous.

You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty.

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

I already own more than any human being needs.

We don't plan to be good or bad. We just think, 'What do I want now? I want coffee now. I want the paper now.'

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

People will always choose more money over more sex.

It's the human condition. We gravitate to what's easy, things that are comfortable, convenient, pain-free, self-serving.

I often buy things, feel a little guilty, but then think that it's so worth it.

A lot of people are obsessed with their possessions, but that's not right. It's OK to own a lot of things as long as you're willing to share them.

Materialism isn't the panacea that so many people think it is.