Consumption Culture Quotes

Consumer culture is contradiction in terms

A product is usually created to improve people's lives; otherwise, why buy it? I'm no genius, but I am an American, and gosh-darnit, I consume, so I know what I'm talking about.

Tardiness is next to wickedness in a society relentless in its consumption of time as both a good and a service--as tweet and Instagram, film clip and sound bite, as sporting event, investment opportunity, Tinder hookup, and interest rate--its value measured not by its texture or its substance but by the speed of its delivery, a distinction apparent to Andy Warhol when he supposedly said that any painting that takes longer than five minutes to make is a bad painting.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.

I try to leave a light footprint. I'm involved with Global Green, which aims to educate people about sustainable building and the greening of schools. I try to be aware about the consumption of unnecessary things in a consumptive culture.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

We kind of have an ingrained, parasitic society. We kind of think it's okay to eat your neighbor.

My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.

Today we're just growing and consuming, and I think maybe there's a sadness in that. People are longing for a time when there was a black and white and good and bad.

Hollywood is designed to check the box office on Monday morning and see: "How'd we do? How much?" It's another facet of this whole culture of accumulation and consumption. Black people are caught up in it, white people are caught up in it, white actors, black actors, female actresses - everybody's caught up in it.

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

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?

We are just statistics, born to consume resources.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people.

We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.