68 Quotes About Consumerism

Consumerism is a phenomenon that’s been around for centuries. It’s a behavior that many people struggle to overcome and yet it’s one of the most divisive and important topics in modern society. If we all had the money we spend on our material goods we could make the world a better place, but we don’t, and instead we contribute to environmental degradation, worker exploitation, and war. What’s your take on consumerism? Do you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing?

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We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Terence McKenna
2
Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things–though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside. Jess C. Scott
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We know — it has been measured in many experiments — that children with strong impulse control grow to be better adjusted, more dependable, achieve higher grades in school and college and have more success in their careers than others. Success depends on the ability to delay gratification, which is precisely what a consumerist culture undermines. At every stage, the emphasis is on the instant gratification of instinct. In the words of the pop group Queen, “I want it all and I want it now.” A whole culture is being infantilised. . Jonathan Sacks
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A customer facing crucial decisions: What should I wipe myself with? What should I brush with? His personal hygiene was deteriorating rapidly as he stared at the rows of possibilities, sweating profusely. Would he ever bathe again? Benson Bruno
In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for...
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In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume in stead of our freedom to find our place in the world. Clive Hamilton
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It used to be that rebels were the type who wore leather jackets, rode motorcycles, smoked cigarettes and drank cheap domestic beer. Today’s rebels are people who look at their world critically and observe the ensnaring patterns of the consumeristic lifestyle." (Life Hacks, p.50 Jon Morrison
You do know you could find yourself charged with being...
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You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you? Terry Pratchett
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile...
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If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Charlie Brooker
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The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them. Ivan Illich
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I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall. Rachel Corrie
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All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we’re a lawyer, an artist or a police officer. Robert Wringham
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But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. Wendell Berry
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The decadent artist markets other people's pain Jennifer Birkett
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Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere. There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.'This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. (From "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine") . Wendell Berry
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The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it–just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her. Alain De Botton
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We no longer live life. We consume it. Vicki Robin
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Now, sorcery rules the world. Of course, most don't call it sorcery; indeed, many would be horrified by such a notion. Instead, they use words like ideology, politics, defence, security, patriotism, commerce, industry, marketing, consumerism and belief. But where there is power-seeking, especially power over others or for oneself, though also over oneself, and be it wittingly or unwittingly conjured up, make no mistake: there is sorcery afoot. It just comes in different shades and colours, that's all. H.M. Forester
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Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers--ugly. No! I don't want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes. Madeleine LEngle
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There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good. Samuel Johnson
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The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike. . Jeremy Seabrook
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This is the typical fallacy on which all of CONSUMER AMERICA is based. Some piece of useless crap will make people like you. Blake Nelson
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These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism. Unknown
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Our identity is affected less and less by what we produce and more and more by what we consume. Pete Sanders
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We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; 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
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We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed. Bryant McGill
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Because our needs are our little daily dreams The little things to be done that project us into tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the future; trivial things that we plan to buy next week, allowing us to think that next week we'll still be alive. Unknown
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Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip. Don DeLillo
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I have every luxury imaginable, I own acres of land, and have enough money to buy the moon were it for sale. Though people think I have everything, it sometimes feels like my possessions own me; towering over me and reducing me into a small bundle of insignificance. J. Matthew Nespoli
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Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly.. This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual. James K.A. Smith
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To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people. John Powell
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Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity. . Richard J. Foster
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The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don't have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to "natural resources" for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life. Lierre Keith
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Most people do not want much. All they want is to be envied by most people. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one, –to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory. Friedrich Nietzsche
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For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one ask a blind man to set himself up as an expert on post-impressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty; their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms; it was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed. . Michel Houellebecq
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So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. . Michael Pollan
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In many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer.” Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore “exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid. Eckhart Tolle
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Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management. George Monbiot
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The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services.... What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe. Ivan Illich
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Little people doing little things in little places everywhere can change the world. Anwar Fazal
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Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag. David Bentley Hart
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What keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more and keep buying and consuming. Eckhart Tolle
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The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance – with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. Jonathan Franzen
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Once employed, the employed's friends are reduced to creatures that he only sees when he has a new problem, or, something new to show off. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film - another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is *never* satiated. And when someone is fully consumed - vampirized - they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers. ("Red Light"). David J. Schow
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A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions. John Kenneth Galbraith
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The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty."Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely. Frederik Pohl
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The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream. Alina Stefanescu
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A balanced die T to make you die with a tea, consists of holding two bags of cookies on each hand and a voracious hunger to consume. Ana Claudia Antunes
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Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order? We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails. Susan Freinkel
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Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of refusal is also an act of assent. Every time we way no to consumer culture, we say yes to something more beautiful and sustaining. Life is not something we go through or that happens to us; it's something we create by our own decisions. Kathleen Dean Moore
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In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone. Aryn Kyle
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When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the product, and a means of announcing your own identity. Gregory C. Carlson
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We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them.. Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important. . Donna Leon
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We have too quickly bought into the lie that we’ll be happier with more–and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less. Joshua Becker
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I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Don’t obsess over having the 'latest' version of a product. For there was a time that the previous version was the latest. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Marketing's illusive promise is that this one product will change your life, make you feel more sexy, satisfy all your heart's desires. L.G. Durand
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The different strategies and visions of ‘reformists’ and ‘radicals’ are not the only subject of major debate within lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer politics. The fact is that only a tiny minority of non-heterosexuals are involved in any sort of political activism. Various writers and activists have noted with rising alarm an almost mass depoliticisation of lesbian and gay communities in the 1990s. The crass commercialism of the gay scene and the rise of the so-called pink pound and of ‘lifestyle’ as a signifier of sexual identity (and human worth) has allowed huge profits to be reaped. Playing on the insecurities of people sells ‘packages’ which can include everything from ‘gay apartments’ to ‘gay holidays’ and ‘gay clothes’ to designer drugs. Richard Dunphy
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With a beaming face celebrate the joyful day and rest not therein. For no one can take away his goods with him. Yea, no one returns again, who has gone hence. Anonymous
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I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Celestine. There are so many blogs and articles in the 'Living' sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Celestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings. David Cronenberg
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Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street. Susan Ee
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If you are not content today, there is nothing you can buy tomorrow to change that. Joshua Becker
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If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished. David Mitchell
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Escape is a commodity like anything else Iain Banks