Jonathan Sacks Quotes

The mall is my life.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

… the spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism

These days malls are the cathedrals of the modern world, and old buildings that had character are gone to allow for econo-worship and peso-pilgrimages.

I am just like a common woman who love shopping in Sarojni Nagar and Janpath. I am the one who shops on Indian street, in malls of Dubai and even vintage stores of London and New York.

Shopping is Not Creating.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.

When I was a kid, you ate, and you drank, and you passed out and nobody woke you up and said, 'Let's go shopping.

How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star?

Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in women's lives. You never saw men milling around in men's departments. They made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.

Escape is a consumer goods like another

I walked inside Macy’s and faced the pathetic spectacle of a department store full of shoppers, none of whom were shopping for themselves. Without the instant gratification of a self-aimed purchase, everyone walked around in the tactical stupor of the financially obligated.

...existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon. In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of the heart and soul — kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman.

I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't do drugs. I shop, okay?

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

I would have people send me shoes and I had 40 pairs and none would fit in the dorm room. People would come by and be like, "Yo, I've been looking for these shoes." I was like, "I'll sell them to you for $300 right now." I'd sell them, save up $4,000 to $5,000, go to the mall and just buy a bunch of new stuff.

Everything we make in life, eventually, is sold for a dollar or a penny or given away.

I guess money can't buy happiness if you shop in the wrong places.

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.

Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, it’s hard to slow yourself down.

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.