Affluent Society Quotes

We like to read about rich people in the newspapers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed.

But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time - it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.

The streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.

One of the things that I do think government counts on is that people are busy. And it's very difficult to mobilize a busy and relatively affluent country, unless it's over really crucial- you know, foundational issues.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich.

Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

Many people in the western world are spoiled by the conveniences of our culture.

The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.

It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

But most Canadians have recognized to a greater or lesser extent that despite much of the so-called progress of the affluent society, essential ingredients to a meaningful life seem to be either entirely lacking, or at best, difficult to grasp.

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

With any bureaucracy, an accountable bureaucracy, we need the press and we need critics to keep us on our toes…. we do wish the press to continue to report and continue to criticize because it is only in that way that the government can continue to improve and meet the aspirations of an increasingly affluent society.

Exclusiveness is a characteristic of recent riches, high society, and the skunk.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

Kids are really tougher than adults, but we tend to forget this in an affluent society that lets kids indulge themselves.

The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

The untalented are more at ease in a society that gives them valid alibis for not achieving than in one where opportunities are abundant. In an affluent society, the alienated who clamor for power are largely untalented people who cannot make use of the unprecedented opportunities for self-realization, and cannot escape the confrontation with an ineffectual self.

If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.

Who has connections to Connecticut? That's where rich people go to live the rest of their life in the woods.

I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money.