Pauline Collins Quotes

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.

So many people think they need to have serious equipment. In the magazines and the media, they see all this stylish stuff, especially on TV, and they think, That's what I need to make it work. You don't. I'm attempting a little bit of liberation here.

I formulated the theme behind 'The Grand Illusion' album after observing how American culture creates illusions through advertising and entertainment to convince us that our lives our lacking, in order to sell products.

The American way of life, as I see it, is really the American way of death. Everything is determined by greed and the insatiable desire to be the richest and most powerful. And that desire is limitless.

We live in an era of consumerism and it's all about desire-based consumerism and it has nothing to do with things we actually need.

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.

The media is convincing people that if you have that 'next thing,' that diamond, the right car, then you'd be happier.

I think a lot of self-identity and inner-personal development is hampered by consumerism and capitalism because we see ourselves as a reflection of the TV, rather than as a reflection of the people who are around us, truly.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

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

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

Consumerism is not simply a market strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us

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

I really believed it was important to explain to our young audience that expectations based on people who are trying to sell them things are unattainable.

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

Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.

Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

People know that pain is part of our nature, that it cannot be avoided and that it should not be avoided. But capitalism in this country is focused on the idea 1) that life can and should be absolutely beautiful; 2) that beauty can be defined according to an ironclad objective standard; 3) that beauty can be held onto forever if only you do the right things perfectly enough; and 4) that it can be purchased.

Throughout their lives, women try to pummel their bodies into some phantom ideal shape that exists only with a lot of airbrushing. ... I don't blame men for this. Men seem to go for us no matter what size and shape we are. I blame capitalism. No, really. The consumer must constantly be in a state of anxious low self-esteem so that she will constantly buy lipsticks and girdles to make her feel cuter.

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.

Our obsession with material things and lack of self-worth is evident in our need for an abundance of momentary luxuries and must-have amenities that have no true value for real, man. And I mean, we do it just to impress people that could care less if your children or your children's children have anything left to show for your life after you gone.

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.