Quotes about Consumerism

Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

It seems to me probable that of all our economic life the element on which we are inclined to place too low an estimate is advertising.

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

Theodore Levitt famously said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole." The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.

I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple making. We have done so partly because we have reduced it to the intellectual assimilation of ideas, partly because of the abiding impact of cultural Christianity embedded in the Christendom understanding of church, and partly because the phenomenon of consumerism in our own day pushes against a true following of Jesus.

Whether we choose it or not, almost all expressions of church in the West are implicitly vulnerable to nondiscipleship, professionalized ministry, spiritual passivity, and consumerism. The problem is rooted in the profoundly nonmissional assumptions of the system itself.

Television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness.

Look, I can surely say by now that I've got the antibodies to communism inside me. But when I think of consumer society, with all its tragedies, I wonder which of the two systems is better.

He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.