Quotes about Consumption

They grow the fruit, But eat the rind

Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product.

we are an overfed and undernourished nation digging an early grave with our teeth...

Our minds are molded in many different ways— often in ways we are not aware of at the time. I am convinced that many things—the films we watch, the television we see, the music we listen to, the books we read—have a great effect on us.

Our magazine shelves are filled with crime and sex pulp-magazines that are being read and devoured by millions of young people... Scores are seeing each week the trash that Hollywood produces. Truly our children are "movie mad".

Too many times we are concerned with how much, instead of how little, like this [world] we can become.

In 2004, Americans spent about $46 billion to lose weight and $22 billion on cosmetics. Those expenditures alone would make the difference between life and death for the people of the world who are dying of starvation

America and Western Europe are on a moneymaking, pleasure-mad spree unparalleled in the history of the world. God is generally ignored or ridiculed. Church members in many cases are only halfhearted Christians. Judgment is coming.

Part of our problem with debt is that we have confused needs with wants. Yesterday's luxuries are today's necessities.

looking over the budgets of a number of the small landowners, whose position is much better than that of the average farm labourer, I found that as much as $5 was spent for wine, while the item for meat was only $2 per year. There are thousands of people in Sicily, I learned, who almost never taste meat. The studies which have been made of the subject indicate that the whole population is underfed.

Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.

That's nearly 600 pounds for every person in the country. And we're not even the biggest consumers of the stuff—that would be China, which installed more concrete in the first 16 years of the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century!