Consumerism Quotations

Edward Abbey

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Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

- Edward Abbey

Unknown Author

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

- Unknown Author

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

- Unknown Author

John Berger

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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

Ambrose Bierce

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

- Ambrose Bierce

Mahatma Gandhi

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Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.

- Mahatma Gandhi

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

Eric Hoffer

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

- Eric Hoffer

Kin Hubbard

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

- Kin Hubbard

Mignon McLaughlin

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Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.

- Mignon McLaughlin

Chuck Palahniuk

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Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

- Chuck Palahniuk

Henry David Thoreau

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

- Henry David Thoreau

Adriano Tilgher

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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

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

Sam Walton

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There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

- Sam Walton

Elwyn Brooks White

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To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

- Elwyn Brooks White