Emma Thompson Quotes

Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.

I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.

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.

A lot of places think that bigger is better. It's like consumerism is taking everything over.

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.

Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence has itself betrayed us.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

I write the shopping column. I think I've proven my superficiality.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.

I shop, therefore I am.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

I will go out of my way to avoid the shopping crowds and the extreme consumerism - I hate all that.

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

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

I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

Not everything in the United States is for sale.