Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
—Guy Debord (1931–94) French Philosopher
What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.
—Andy Warhol (1928–87) American Painter, Printmaker, Film Personality
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
—Erich Fromm (1900–80) German-American Psychoanalyst, Social Philosopher
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
—E. M. Forster (1879–1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing.
—William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) English Anglican Clergyman, Priest, Mystic
We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) Indian Hindu Political leader
Oh, what a void there is in things.
—Persius (34–62 CE) Roman Satirist
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.
—Hesiod (f.700 BCE) Greek Poet
There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair.
—Frank A. Clark
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows…the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity…mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
—Unknown
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
Somebody said to me, “But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.” That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, “Now, let’s write a swimming pool.”
—Paul McCartney (b.1942) English Pop Singer, Songwriter
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.
—Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) British Crime Writer
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
There must be more to life than having everything.
—Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American Illustrator, Writer of Children’s Books
Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.
—Henri Frederic Amiel (1821–81) Swiss Moral Philosopher, Poet, Critic
The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is no want of the former. To produce, implies that the producer de_sires to consume; why else should he give himself useless labor? He may not wish to consume what he himself produces, but his motive for producing and selling is the desire to buy. Therefore, if the producers generally produce and sell more and more, they certainly also buy more and more.
—John Stuart Mill (1806–73) English Philosopher, Economist
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
—John Updike (1932–2009) American Novelist, Poet, Short-Story Writer
When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
Junk is something you keep for years and then throw out two weeks before you need it.
—Unknown
Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
—John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) English Economist
Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.
The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy what they want at the cheapest price. Their buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the farms. They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities. They are merciless bosses, full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. For them nothing counts other than their own satisfaction. They do not care a whit for past merit and vested interests. If something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. In their capacity as buyers and consumers they are hard-hearted and callous, without consideration for other people.
—Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) Austrian Economist, Philosopher, Author
Leave a Reply