Cornelia Parker Quotes

The modern girl is less concerned with everything being a brand name.

I don't buy diamonds, I don't buy cars, but I enjoy travelling. I'm not a very possessive person as far as things go.

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.

I don't enjoy good food. I don't enjoy flashy cars. I don't care if I live in a dump. I don't enjoy good clothes. This is the best I've dressed in months.

We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.

We have allowed ourselves to be defined by our consumption instead of by our ability to move beyond it.

Individually, people are finding that a simpler lifestyle provides greater satisfaction than relentless pursuit of materialism.

Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

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.

We buy too much stuff we just don't need. We're trying to look cute for next weekend when we ought to be thinking about the next decade.

I just realized at least what I was doing was making a lot of stuff that nobody needed and pushing a consumerist society. So I went to do something else.

When we think about the trends that millennials are taking toward simplicity, I think it's indicative of a cultural shift toward less of the 'more is more' for materialism sake and more of an emphasis on efficiency, value, and sustainability.

There’s this idea that somehow you’ve got to keep changing things, and as often as possible. Maybe if people just decided not to buy anything for a while, they’d get a chance to think about what they wanted; what they really liked.

Our economy is based upon people wanting more; their happiness on wanting less.

The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.

Avoid the philosophy and excuse that yesterday's luxuries have become today's necessities. They aren't necessities unless we ourselves make them such. . . . It is essential for us to live within our means.

If capitalism begins as the practical idealism of the aspiring bourgeoisie, it ends ... as an orgy of materialism.

The American way of life, as I see it, is really the American way of death. Everything is determined by greed and the insatiable desire to be the richest and most powerful. And that desire is limitless.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

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

For now, capitalism is working to produce more money but does not see the people. This problem is getting worse across the world.

I am totally unattached to material items.

I often think about, 'How do we return to a simpler way of living? Is there some way that we can start to think of each other as human beings again, instead of worshiping money, instead of worshiping electronics, instead of worshiping getting ahead just for me?'

I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year?