Consumerism And Materialism Quotes & Sayings

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market. — Piers Steel

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.
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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

I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed. — John D. Caputo

People are realizing that what seemed important to them in their lives-materialism and consumerism-doesn't work at all to make a happy heart. It actually makes an unhappy heart. And an unhappy world. — Sylvia Boorstein

A broke man's lover doesn't feel 'loved' on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine's Day. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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. — Greg Carlson

Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection. — Vironika Tugaleva

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

Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas. — Jacob Needleman

Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective. — Alan Hirsch

Now, it so happens that our culture - or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis - places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture's emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself. — Neel Burton

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

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

The Master said, If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment. — Confucius

The Master said, "A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with."
(Analects 4.9) — Confucius

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

Ambition is greed without makeup. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself. — Vironika Tugaleva

The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism. — Bryant H. McGill

Ambition' is 'greed' rebranded. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To possess possessions, a man will "sell himself" to have what another has, but it never dawns on him ~ that the more he gets, the less he keeps of himself. — Rius

All of us experience the sad effects of blind submission to consumerism. In the first place it represents crass materialism. At the same time it represents a radical dissatisfaction because one quickly learns that the more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled. — Pope John Paul II

Life punishes those who have things in abundance by making them worry about petty things like: what to wear, or, which car to drive. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Let us be bold enough to ask ourselves as Christians whether the Church of the Lord Jesus in the United States has anything to say to our nation and its ideologies of materialism, possessiveness, and the worship of financial security. Are we courageous enough to be a sign of contradiction to consumerism through our living faith in Jesus Christ? Are we committed enough to his gospel to become a countercurrent to the drift? — Brennan Manning

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

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