Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.

Most of the things we buy are wants. And we call them needs, but they're wants.

I think we've been dulled by capitalism. We're just blobs now - we're so worried about how we can keep paying the lease on the car, the mortgage, the lease on the toaster and all that. You can't really think about much else. If you lose that, you lose the whole lot.

First of all, the American people are inundated with advertisement after advertisement of you buy, buy, buy. You've got to have the latest thing. The iPad 1 isn't any good anymore, you've got to have the iPad 2. The iPhone 4, now you've got to have iPhone 4S. Now you've got to have the 5b, now you've got to have the 6c.

Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

Children have adopted a consumerist attitude - I dare you to entertain me.

'Be comfortable with who you are', reads the headline on the Hush Puppies poster. Are they mad? If people were comfortable with who they were, they'd never buy any products except the ones they needed, and then where would the advertising industry be?

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.

We live in an era of consumerism and it's all about desire-based consumerism and it has nothing to do with things we actually need.

The easier things are to buy, the more we consume.

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

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

It feels so weird to be able to just kind of buy things when I want them or need them.

Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.

The working class has been turned into a consuming class - a situation has been created where people value their worth by what they can afford.

He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it creates more wants than it supplies.

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.

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

That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.

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.

We always want more. Whether it is better clothes, a bigger house, faster cars, or the latest gadgets, satisfaction in these days of consumerism is difficult to find.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now , consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

I just saw an ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was this woman-and I think it's degrading to womankind-she was going out of her mind over a new product called "A Thousand Flushes." Here she was in her toilet, saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and, "My life is complete!" Good God-if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're sick!