Advertising Consumerism Quotes & Sayings

Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs. — Bill Plotkin

I don't wear fur and I understand their cause. I am the biggest animal lover in the world. I have four dogs and two horses, and I have rescued animals all my life. — Gisele Bundchen

It's really hard to find materials. Also, prices of metal have gone completely through the roof, insanely expensive. And if you go to a dictionary and look up starving artist, you'll see my picture. — Z'EV

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. — Christopher Lasch

And in love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit. — Marcel Proust

There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons. — Stephanie Mills

After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game. — Gunter Grass

Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God. — Walter Brueggemann

[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life ... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell. — Nicholas Murray

Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come. — Kalle Lasn

In the Soviet Union you weren't allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors. — Kalle Lasn

Whom one is speaking to - or which aspect of their character - fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. 'Indulge Your Desires' comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than it does spray-painted across the broken windows of an SUV dealer. It follows that what you say is not nearly as important as how and when you say it. — CrimethInc.

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going. — Herman E. Daly

In the advertisement, anonymous hands wielded shiny shiny blades that chopped through butter and animal bone as if they were the same thing, through ice and tendon and untreated wood as if there was no difference between anything in the world - only a slight variation in grain, visible once something has been split in half. — Alexandra Kleeman

If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism
the single greatest source of its waning morality
I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose
say the exaltation of the public sector
it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions. — Robert L. Hellbroner

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ. — Eugene H. Peterson

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. — Virginie Despentes

I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars. — Philip Larkin

Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago. — Kalle Lasn

There were all manners of souvenirs and trinkets for sale when Ciro and Luigi disembarked from the ferry into the port of lower Manhattan. Signs advertising Sherman Turner cigars, Zilita Black tobacco, and Roisin's Doughnuts graced rolling carts selling Sally Dally Notions and Flowers by Yvonne Benne. The stands competed for the immigrant business. Ciro and Luigi came face to face with the engine of American life: You work, and then you spend. — Adriana Trigiani

The parts of my new job that filled me with abject and irrational fear, that twisted me into all kinds of knots, were the raw emotions of those left alive. It was the living who were the great unknown. — Scot Gardner

If you've ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don't have to tell you, that's not what's done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.

That's not what an ad for a car is - an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you've ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices - that's what advertising is. — Noam Chomsky

THE MISCONCEPTION: Both consumerism and capitalism are sustained by corporations and advertising. THE TRUTH: Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status. — David McRaney

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

Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing. — John O'Donohue

I hope to take advantage of the Netflix organism and see if there are ways to get in new material and see if there are ways to do deleted scenes. — Mitchell Hurwitz