Measured in constant dollars, the world’s people have consumed as many goods and services since 1950 (1996) as all previous generations put together. Since 1940, Americans alone have used up as large a share of the Earth’s mineral resources as did everyone before them combined. Yet this historical epoch of titanic consumption appears to have […]
Consumers - Consumption Quotes
So the wearing of wild beasts’ skins has gone out of fashion… Skins yesterday, purple and gold today – such are the baubles that embitter human life with resentment.
But somehow, the First World has managed to give it all a happy spin. We have decided not to avoid decadence but to embrace it. Crave it. Buy it. Sell it. What’s decadent? Ice cream with the density of plutonium, a bubblebath with a barley-flour chaser, that great new Gucci scent called “Envy.” Decadence is […]
Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.
Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man […]
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
Man’s happiness today consists in ‘having fun.’ Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and ‘taking in’ commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies – all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the […]
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike.
We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.
