Thursday 8 August 2013

Consumerism

 Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful


Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.  ~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990


God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains.  If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks.  ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990


Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  ~Author Unknown


Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.  ~Pam Shaw


You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.  ~Eric Hoffer


You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.  ~Vernon Howard


The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.  ~Mad Magazine


Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other.  It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.  Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash.  The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.  ~John Berger


Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.  ~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970


To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.  ~Elwyn Brooks White


I may be a pessimist, but the philosophy of anti-thrift just now coming into being seems to me the greatest danger to the peace of the world.  ~Adriano Tilgher


There must be more to life than having everything!  ~Maurice Sendak


The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.  ~Francis H. Bradley


Avarice is fear sheathed in gold. ~Paul Eldridge


Mammon, n.:  The god of the world's leading religion.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk


He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.  ~Author Unknown


Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.  ~Unknown


Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. ~Edward Abbey


We realize we can't have everything, and so begins the mad scramble to have everything else. ~Robert Brault,


The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more. ~Kin Hubbard


How do you take a medium seriously when it is so laced with high decibel reminders to run right out to your supermarket, your drug store, your friendly car dealer, your favorite department store and buy.... That's the twentieth century marching song — buy! ~Rod Serling, speech at second district AAF meeting, quoted in Media Decisions, vol. 9, part 1, 1974


In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.  ~Richard Bach


Forethought and temperance are the virtues which produced thrift, and with thrift the economic progress of society.  And those are the virtues which today are gravely compromised.  ~Adriano Tilgher


Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist.  At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.  ~George Orwell


Who covets more, is evermore a slave.  ~Robert Herrick


The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.  ~Paul Heyne

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