Quotes about Consumerism

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many

Materialism and self-centeredness are the great vices of our age.

America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth! We know that because we have the greatest variety and greatest number of artificial amusements of any country. People have become so empty that they can't even entertain themselves.

Many young people are building their lives on the rock of materialism. I find across the country a deep economic discontent among people in every walk of life.

Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

It seems to me probable that of all our economic life the element on which we are inclined to place too low an estimate is advertising.

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

Theodore Levitt famously said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole." The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.

I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple making. We have done so partly because we have reduced it to the intellectual assimilation of ideas, partly because of the abiding impact of cultural Christianity embedded in the Christendom understanding of church, and partly because the phenomenon of consumerism in our own day pushes against a true following of Jesus.