Hannah Arendt Quotes

Our culture is hung up on and overemphasises what can be derived from material objects. I think this is something quite new, over the past 200 or 300 years - that life has become about accumulating material wealth. The 21st century is not about accumulating material wealth like the 20th century. It's already eroding.

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology.

When a country wants television more than they want clean water, they've lost their grip.

But you've got to have money for comfort, which obviously doesn't matter as much when you're young, but even so. I always like to bloody eat well and be warm. Have a drink when I want it.

I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living.

The human-made world is mostly beyond our comprehension. Our daily survival depends on seemingly magical gizmos that provide our food, water, clothing, comfort, transportation, education, well-being, and amusement.

I have nightmares that I'm going to wake up, and everyone's driving a Prius and living in a condo, and we're all getting health insurance.

Put too many one-size-fits-all jackets on Americans and the place explodes.

If you look around the world, the countries with the best environmental practices are the wealthiest. There's a reason for that. If you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from or shelter over your head, your focus is on those things.

Bend everything toward improving the standard of living of the people.

People are getting richer all over the world and they are going to want to live the way Americans live. And that is going to place a big strain on our environment and will be a great challenge.

Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.

The whole world, it's a problem that there's too much stuff being produced. We don't have time to reflect on the important things in life.

The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.

In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs.

Although the Great Leader told us that we have to let the people eat rice with meat soup, wear silk clothes and live in a tiled roof house, we have not accomplished his will. We have already reached the status of a strong country in the military field, let alone politics and ideology, but there are still quite a number of things lacking in people's lives. I am trying to implement his will by solving these problems.

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

Let's face it, we're all clones nowadays. We've all got the same archives, we've all got the same Hyundai, we've all got the same Mac or PC components, and we're all being told the same news stories globally.

…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.

Americans are getting like a Ford car, they all have the same exact parts, the same upholstering and make exactly the same noises.

We don't measure whether an economy is developing. We just measure whether companies are selling more, whether inventories are up or down, not whether the health, safety and economic well-being of people are being advanced.

Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.