John Phillips Quotes

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

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

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

We as Americans have ripped off the world. We get to throw food away. It's insane.

The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

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

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

People have been convinced that growth for growth's sake is a good thing.

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

Homer Simpson is one of my favorite people, though he's not real. He represents the American who's filled with this 'affluenza.' He's constantly exposed to consumption and a sense of bigness, which is a part of being an American.

Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

The Happy Warrior of Squandermania.

When I like something, I wear it into the ground, then really regret it.

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration: it accelerates economic activity, and this is eating up the world. It's eating up resources, it's processing, it's manufacturing, it's distributing, it's consuming. That's what the computer's real work does, and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop, just to satisfy our own narrow needs.

Growth by accumulation only is sickness.

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

People on sets can be unbearably wasteful in general.

We are living and consuming more than we need, and this impacts our survival.

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.

The model of the consumer society is something that will one day end. My personal view is that too much consumption is wrong.

The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.

America is a country of excess.

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.