Cornel West Quotes

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

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

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

I think one of the most pervasive evils in this world is greed and acquiring money for money's sake. Once you have six houses and a plane, it's just about a number. It's never been anything I understood.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

We've been raised to compete, to want more! More! More! It's a way of life. It's about greed.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

The ideology and practice of individual acquisition, accumulation and concentration are now ascendant

In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United States.

I don't understand this pathetic need for luxuries.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it

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.

I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.

We inhabit a world where we're taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it - the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

Worldly pleasures, such as flow from greatness, riches, honours, and sensual gratifications, are infinitely worse than none.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

We are shallow because we have become enslaved by gross materialism, the glitter of gold and its equivalents, for which reason we think that only the material goods of this earth can satisfy us and we must therefore grab as much as can while we are able.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

Now I'm a blithering oaf hanging on to the coatsleeves of commerciality.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.