Jane Goodall Quotes

I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital ... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

'As Long As I Know I'm Getting Paid' is a satire. Lyrically, I want to be direct. With my history in Fall Out Boy, there's some expectation that I'm going to be lyrically obtuse. But that song is a straight-faced satire of consumerism.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.

However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

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

Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed.

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

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.

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

We must be aware of consumerism! That's our tendency. It's the capitalistic curse that we were poisoned with. We should spend only what is necessary. How do you call the big cars, the latest ones? Hummer! Not a single dollar to import Hummers! What is that? What is that? What kind of revolution is this? One of Hummers? No way!

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.

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

But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.

[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo.

Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.

One of the things capitalism does is, it does enhance and exacerbate the sin of pride, making yourself, the material world the center of your universe, instead of God's will.

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.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

I've lived a lot in communist countries and they're intensely interested in money. I think they are more interested in money than capitalists are. They're the most materialistic people in the world. What they're actually living for is material things. The irony of that is that in communist countries there isn't anything to buy.

Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.