Consumers Quotes - Page 26

• All too much of the wage structure has been based on the time workers put in, rather than upon the product put out. The consumer dollar has no interest in how much time it buys-only in the character and quality of the product itself.

  Wheeler McMillen

  Business, Character, Quality

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• It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," What Are People For?, 1989 Jesus pioneered a relationship ethic based on compassion. Being a disciple means building relationships - with the Creator and with all creation and creatures.

  Leonard Sweet

  Jesus, Mean, Animal

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• ...the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right-there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.

  Brian D. McLaren

  Grateful, Thinking, Tragedy

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• As businessmen caught a glimpse of the potentialities inherent in endlessly expanding the wants of people under consumerism, forced draft or otherwise, many began to see blue skies... What was needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers-and strategies that would provide products assuring such wastefulness. Even where wastefulness was not involved, additional strategies were needed that would induce the public to consume at ever-higher levels.

  Vance Packard

  Blue, Sky, Numbers

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• Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Want, Bizarre, Made

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.33, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Economists use the word consume to mean "utilize economic goods," but the Shorter Oxford Dictionary's definition is more appropriate to ecologists: "To make away with or destroy; to waste or to squander; to use up." The economies that cater to the global consumer society are responsible for the lion's share of the damage that humans have inflicted on common global resources.

  Alan Thein Durning

  Mean, Oxford, Use

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• Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

  Pope Francis

  Mean, Culture, Leftovers

  "Pope Francis: Capitalism is 'a new tyranny'" by Katie Mcdonough, www.salon.com. November 26, 2013.

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• In a consumer society, expectations dare not plateau, because a growing economy depends on rising expectations... The more we let our level of contentment be determined by outside factors-a new car, fashionable clothes, a prestigious career, social status-the more we relinquish control over our own happiness.

  Paul Brand

  Careers, Clothes, Expectations

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• Roughly two billion people participate in the money economy, with less than half of those living in the wealthy countries of the developed world. These affluent 800 million, however, account for more than 75 percent of the world's energy and resource consumption, and also create the bulk of its industrial, toxic, and consumer waste.

  Stuart L. Hart

  Country, Two, People

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• The money economy thus leaves a large ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and resources required to meet a typical consumer's needs. For example, with only about 4% of the world's population, the United States, the largest money economy, consumes in excess of one-quarter of the world's energy and materials and generates in excess of 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

  Stuart L. Hart

  Land, Energy, Typical

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• The whole attempt to advance the kind of consumer society that depends for its growth on the ceaseless stimulation of unlimited covetousness among the rich, while the poor majority rot in their poverty-this is surely something against which a Christian should be a nonconformist.

  Lesslie Newbigin

  Christian, Growth, Majority

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• We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

  Neil Postman

  Children, Objectivity, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.61, Vintage

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• If the Christ we follow sent out his disciples with no extra possessions (Luke 9:1-6 and 10:1-12) and warned would-be devotees that he had nowhere to lay his head (see Luke 9:57-62), then we must recognize that it is extremely difficult to live in a Christian way in a consumer culture.

  Marva Dawn

  Christian, Would Be, Culture

  Marva J. Dawn (1999). “A Royal Waste of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World”, p.88, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

  Wendell Berry

  Character, Culture, Answers

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.198, Counterpoint Press

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• The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air access remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

  Wendell Berry

  Military, Independent, Technology

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.16, Counterpoint

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• I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.

  Diablo Cody

  Thinking, Avid, People

  "Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, and Screenwriter Diablo Cody YOUNG ADULT Interview". collider.com. December 6, 2011.

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• If consumers don't have the wherewithal to spend because all the money's going to the top, and the people at the top only spend a very small fraction of what they earn, then the economy is almost inevitably destined to slow.

  Robert Reich

  People, Economy, Fractions

  "Why Robert Reich cares so passionately about economic inequality". "PBS NewsHour" with Judy Woodruff, www.pbs.org. October 15, 2013.

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• Animal abusers are not the only culprits - the consumers are the biggest abusers! As long as buyers, users, attendees at animal performances, etc., keep using, abusers keep abusing!!!

  Adela Popescu

  Animal, Long, Etc

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• One of the changes I'm driving within Nokia is to adopt what we call 'the challenger mindset.' Let's understand that we have to fight, we have to fight our way through the difficulties, we have to listen to consumers, we have to both deliver what they need and also have some creativity and insight and deliver what the don't yet know they need.

  Stephen Elop

  Creativity, Fighting, Nokia

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• When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable animated instrument which is Aristotle's definition of a slave.

  Eric Hoffer

  Independent, Men, Mind

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I do not think it is any benefit for artists or fans to have all the new, wide distribution channels in the online world controlled by those who have controlled the old, narrower ones, .. This is especially true if they achieve that control by leveraging their dominance in content or conduit space in an anticompetitive way to control the new, independent music services that are attempting to enhance the consumer's experience of music.

  Orrin Hatch

  Independent, Artist, Thinking

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• Since man does not create physical matter, those who handle material objects in the production process are not producers in that sense. Economic benefits result from the transformation of matter in form, location, or availability (intellectually or temporally). It is these transformations that create economic benefits valued by consumers, and whoever arranges such transformations contributes to the value of things, whether his hands actually come into contact with physical objects or not.

  Thomas Sowell

  Men, Hands, Availability

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• Just before consumers stop doing something, they do it with a vengeance.

  Faith Popcorn

  Popcorn, Vengeance

  Faith Popcorn (1991). “The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life”, p.104, BookBaby

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• Stop being a consumer, fight the power!

  Peaches Geldof

  Fighting

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• If you voluntarily label a product as being unsuitable for kids and then turn around and market it directly to kids in contradiction of your ratings system, then you should be held accountable just like any other company in America that misleads consumers. That's not censorship. That's common sense.

  Joe Lieberman

  Kids, America, Common Sense

  "Bill seeks to end marketing adult music to children" by Dana Bash, www.cnn.com. April 26, 2001.

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