Thomas Merton Quotes

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

Marketing is all pervasive. They're getting marketed products they can't afford - can't ever hope to acquire. They believe the only way they're ever going to achieve happiness is the acquisition of these products. Products they can't afford. They see people living that lifestyle, and they have that lifestyle beamed incessantly into their minds through media, which you know I participate in.

A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.

I think fashion, mishandled, can be quite toxic. It becomes about image and the cult of celebrity. I think when an artist is seen at a lot of parties as a celebrity, I find that worrying. I think it can limit them.

Practically everything from hairstyles to lifestyles is endorsed as some sort of drug to be taken Now for Instant Relief.

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

We all think we're liberated when we have more of everything, don't we? That's what the media tell us.

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

I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need.

The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

Children's television has been grossly over-commercialized. The subtle message is, "Buy me! Buy me!

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

I formulated the theme behind 'The Grand Illusion' album after observing how American culture creates illusions through advertising and entertainment to convince us that our lives our lacking, in order to sell products.

I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.

Consumer culture needs us to be impulsive, while our political culture fears that we will ever develop discipline.

The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don't really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.

It's insidious how Hollywood warps your values without you even realizing that it's happening to you. You get a little whiff of success and it whets your appetite, and before you know it you're going right down the road they've laid out for you.

We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life; but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.

It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.