Mindless Consumption Quotes

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.

I think we are slowly killing liberty, creativity, intelligent thinking; it's as if we are being led into a world that is like a huge shopping centre, with a sort of anaesthesia about everything except the choice of goods in front of us.

My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

Television is a passivity.

We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.

The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

'Star Trek' is the McDonald's of science fiction; it's fast food storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time, and you don't really have to get involved. It's all plastic.

Television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Television is simply automated daydreaming.

Everybody is entertained to death.

There are so many people who just want a flashy object in front of their eyes and don't want to think at all; I find that disturbing.

If life is going well, I watch quality things like period dramas and 'The Blue Planet.' But other times, I'll trawl through anything Freeview has to offer. I do believe TV can ruin your mind, but it can also be a really good friend.

We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind.

I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.

Outside of the mindless sitcoms that the networks thrive on, people able to think generally consider most entertainment is escape in one form or another.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

We're plugged in 24 hours a day now. We're all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not. And if we can't unplug from that machine, eventually we're going to become mindless.

Americans are like Pac Man. We just eat our way through the day. There's always something going into the mouth.

One can watch hours and hours of TV without actually losing interest, but, as with Chinese food, one is rarely left with much residue of nourishment.