Ellen Willis Quotes

I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

I shop, therefore I am.

Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives.

Someone said, and rightfully, that "property is theft'." There's no way a man can stand and tell me that he owns an apple tree. I just don't believe you. And so this pursuit of position and money and power, they are all wrapped up into one package that I think is crippling, debilitating and limiting. And unfortunately, people get sucked into it and then they've got you on the treadmill. You know: ''You've got to have a good job'' and "You've got to have a good education'' - which is another word for indoctrination. We're never going to rise above these limitations we've placed on ourselves.

The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

I'm not interested in being commodified. I'm not into being sold. I'm not a slave.

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

Capitalism offers you freedom, but far from giving people freedom, it enslaves them.

We all think we're liberated when we have more of everything, don't we? That's what the media tell us.

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

These fledgling democracies in the Middle East, they're actually fighting for their freedom. And what are they rioting for in England? Leisurewear.

We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.

Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.