Prestonia Mann Martin Quotes

There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

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

The current public aspiration seems to be: Get what you can. Can what you get. Sit on the can behind gated fences.

Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches.

In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.

It's the aspirations that capitalism is promoting as beautiful, positive attributes that are dangerous. All that is in the bedrooms of the poor and in the villages of the Third World, and it's like a cruel carrot that's being waved in front of people's noses. It's a seduction, an unattainable dream.

The avarice of mankind is insatiable; at one time two obols was pay enough; but now, when this sum has become customary, men always want more and more without end.

Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.

Well, I am happy, and I won't fret, but it does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants.

Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough.

With much we surfeit; plenty makes us poor.

What man in his right senses, that has wherewithal to live free, would make himself a slave for superfluities? What does that man want who has enough? Or what is he the better for abundance that can never be satisfied.

A strange species we are; we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.

The covetous man is ever in want.

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers.

Greed in human nature may now come near to enslaving all humanity by means of the Machine - so fast and far has progress gone with it. This will be evident to anyone who stops to study the modern mechanistic Moloch and takes time to view it in its larger aspects.

Wealth acts merely as a kind of mirror to show you human nature at its worst.

This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?

Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.