Materialism Quotes - Page 12

• The problem isn't materialism as such. Rather it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences.

  Dalai Lama

  Animal, Survival, Desire

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• When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.

  Shane Claiborne

  Thinking, Challenges, Age

  "Embracing the Margins". Interview with Matt Dabbs, wineskins.org. November 17, 2015.

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• I think materialism has trumped a lot of stuff, but I don't think it has trumped the heart, especially when it comes to (a person's) last thought.

  Shirley MacLaine

  Heart, Thinking, Stuff

  "Shirley MacLaine is angelic in ‘Heavenly’ Hallmark TV movie". Interview With Lynn Elber, www.apnews.com. November 22, 2016.

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• It's a flaw in our argument, for sure. By any reading of evolutionary theory, creationists ought to have died out ages ago. They serve no function in the planet's ecosystem, and no other species has survived so long while in such fundamental disagreement with observable reality. If I wasn't such an ardent believer in secular materialism, I'd wager this is really troubling Darwin in the afterlife.

  Richard Dawkins

  Reading, Reality, Ecosystems

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• Yes, of course [this age] is materialistic, but the only way to counteract it is to create spiritual things. Don't worry yourself about the materialism too much. Create and stir other people to create!

  Robert Frost

  Spiritual, Creativity, People

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• Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

  John Searle

  Study, Problem, Deny

  "Consciousness and Language". Book by John Searle, 2002.

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• And I, a materialist who does not believe in the starry heaven promised to a human being, for this dog and for every dog I believe in heaven, yes, I believe in a heaven that I will never enter, but he waits for me wagging his big fan of a tail so I, soon to arrive, will feel welcomed.

  Pablo Neruda

  Dog, Believe, Afterlife

  Pablo Neruda (2015). “The Poetry of Pablo Neruda”, p.880, Macmillan

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• If European symbols and traditions have grown tired, perfunctory and oppressively banal in Australia, or been drained of spirit and meaning by the dreary dictates of materialism and secularity, then the raw spirit truth of our native land is alive and radiant by comparison. For joy and meaning we might well turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place.

  Michael Leunig

  Wisdom, Country, Nature

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• We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.

  Janet Holmes a Court

  Life, Business, Healing

  "Visions: Turkish Earthquake - an Islamic apocalyptic sign? The dream of Janet Holmes a' Court and a republican prophet - John Dunmore Lang". Interview with John Cleary, www.abc.net.au. August 25, 1999.

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• A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools.

  William Z. Foster

  Religious, Philosophy, Teaching

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• The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Money, Waiting, Challenges

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.305, Random House

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• Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.

  John Berger

  Wall, Shopping, Shadow

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.896, Vintage

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• [There is] a strange split in thinking common to those on the religious left, who are quick to denounce the profit motive and commercialism. Yet, they seem to think that the key to happiness is giving people more stuff - by enlisting the coercive power of government. This perverse way of thinking holds that 'social justice' demands that we take money from those who have earned it and give it to those who have less of it. That's not social justice; that's materialism.

  Robert Sirico

  Religious, Thinking, Keys

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• New pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as conspicuous elements of the American character.

  Vance Packard

  Character, Self, People

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• We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

  Wole Soyinka

  Humanity, World, Matter

  "Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka". "The Tavis Smiley show", www.pbs.org. December 4, 2012.

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• Many Christians and Christian leaders have been neutralized by the love of money and materialism. The homage paid to affluence becomes a burden that saps our energy as well as our love for God and other people...Like Jesus and Paul, we can learn to be content with what we have, living modestly in order that we may give liberally to the work of the kingdom and to meet the needs of others.

  John Wimber

  Christian, Jesus, Order

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• The cure for materialism is to have enough for everybody and to share. When people are sure of having what they need they cease to think about it.

  Henry Ford

  Money, Thinking, People

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• When a person's primary objective is to maximize material pleasures while minimizing discomforts, then life becomes a constant process of "pushing" (trying to push away from discomforts) and "grabbing" (trying to acquire or hold on to that which gives pleasure). With the loss of inner balance that accompanies a habitual "pushing and grabbing" approach to life, a deeper pain ensues-that of becoming aware of the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of the pleasure-seeking/pain-avoiding process itself.

  Duane Elgin

  Pain, Loss, Pleasure Seeking

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• This is our most dangerous addiction - our addiction to things. For it is this addiction that underlies the materialism of our age. And nowhere is this addiction more apparent than in our addiction to money.

  Russell Peters

  Addiction, Age, Culture

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• Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism, fools making laws for the breaking of jaws.

  Bob Dylan

  Law, Politics, Fool

  Song: No Time to Think, Album: Street Legal, 1978

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• Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake. If material poverty is to be avoided, spiritual poverty is to be abhorred. For it is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Spiritual, Lying, Lakes

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• It seems mutants have something in their lives called gravy. They know truth, but it is buried under thickening and spices of convenience, materialism, insecurity, and fear. They also have something called frosting. It seems to represent how they spend almost all the seconds of their existence in doing superficial, artificial, temporary, pleasant-tasting, nice appearing projects and spend very few actual seconds of their lives developing their eternal beingness.

  Marlo Morgan

  Nice, Insecurity, Mutants

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• He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Fall, Liberty, May

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Human Action”, p.241, Lulu Press, Inc

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• From first to last it is a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked up ... . And why is this done? For no other reason, I am sure, except to make us independent of a Creator.

  Adam Sedgwick

  Independent, Lasts, Firsts

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• Do not think me mad. It is not to make money that I believe a Christian should live. The noblest thing a man can do is, just humbly to receive, and then go amongst others and give.

  David Livingstone

  Christian, Believe, Godly

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