Ezra Taft Benson Quotes

This is the other thing: we make the cost of raising kids higher than it has to be just because we feel they need all this stuff, like gadgets, certain schools, and activities that are nice but aren't really necessary.

The economics of life is against the family.

We have so much poverty in our country. Not every parent can afford to buy their kids all the frills and perks, but teenagers still demand it, and are we responsible for it!

People tend to discuss things like relationships with family and friends, and the fact that I'm the only breadwinner in the family. And honestly, I cashed in on it.

From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.

I'm not against people having new cars. I'm against them having you. We spend a tremendous amount impressing somebody at the stoplight who we'll never meet. It makes you broke and keeps you broke.

We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?

I got a wife who likes expensive things, so she takes all the cash.

I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse.

Many a family, in order to make a 'proper showing,' will commit itself for a larger and more expensive house than is needed, in an expensive neighborhood. Almost everyone would, it seems, like to keep up with the Joneses.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.

When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids' education, to find their kids coming back to live with them - well, that was not what they bargained for.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income.

For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.

When my daughter wanted a toy and I had to check the price of it before buying it - that was one of the worst feelings.

The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.

I'm constantly questioning the effects technology has had on our lives and the effect that monetary debt has had on all of us. We keep this as a dark little secret: 'This is how much interest I owe.'

My father was a truck driver, made $50 a week. And the reason why I know that so vividly is my Mom used to just constantly give him a hard time for that.

I really resent how expensive everything is in London.

I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.

I totally cared - that I didn't have access to the money to get the coolest clothes ate away at me.

If advertising encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.