Overconsumption Quotes - Page 7

• 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

  Christian, Jesus, Church

  Brennan Manning (2011). “The Signature of Jesus”, p.73, Multnomah

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• Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Garden, Clothes

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.212, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing.

  William Ralph Inge

  Happiness, People, Bored

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• You, O money, are the cause of a restless life! Because of you we journey toward a premature death; you provide cruel nourishment for the evils of men; the seed of our cares sprouts from your head.

  Propertius

  Money, Journey, Men

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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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• However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.

  Wendell Berry

  Powerful, Government, Roots

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

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• Advertising signs: they con you into thinking you're the one That can do what's never been done That can win what's never been won Meantime life outside goes on all around you

  Bob Dylan

  Winning, Thinking, Done

  Bob Dylan (2014). “The Lyrics: Since 1962”, p.188, Simon and Schuster

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• The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Intelligent, Thinking, Class

  Martin Luther King (Jr.), Michael K. Honey (2011). “All Labor Has Dignity”, p.115, Beacon Press

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• Advertisers regularly con us into believing that we genuinely need one luxury after another. We are convinced that we must keep up with or even go one better than our neighbors. So we buy another dress, sports jacket or sports car and thereby force up the standard of living. The ever more affluent standard of living is the god of twentieth century North America and the adman is its prophet.

  Ronald J. Sider

  Sports, Believe, Luxury

  Ronald J. Sider (1977). “Rich Christians in an age of hunger: a Biblical study”, IVP Books

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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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• The cultural propaganda embodied in two liquor advertisements, "Living well is the best revenge" and "Sip it with arrogance," have a curious, perhaps demonic appeal. Consumerism indeed has its own spirituality.

  Brennan Manning

  Revenge, Two, Arrogance

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• A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the businessman it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Men, Differences, Quality

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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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• 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

  Want, Firsts, Materialism

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• How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

  John the Apostle

  Brother, Children, Doe

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• High thinking is inconsistent with a complicated material life based on high speed and imposed on us by mammon worship.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Thinking, Worship, Complicated

  Mahatma Gandhi (2005). “All Men Are Brothers”, p.120, A&C Black

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• For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Demand, Potatoes

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• Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Rich Or Poor, Long

  Samuel Johnson (1824). “Works: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.135

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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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• Day by day night after night Blinded by the neon lights Hurry here, hustlin' there No one's got the time to spare Money's tight, nothin' free Won't somebody come and rescue me? I am stranded, caught in the crossfire Stranded, caught in the crossfire! Tooth for tooth, eye for an eye Sell your soul just to buy, buy, buy Beggin' a dollar stealin' a dime Come on can't you see that I I am stranded, caught in the crossfire

  Stevie Ray Vaughan

  Eye, Night, Light

  Song: Crossfire

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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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• Consume more than you need This is the dream Make you pauper Or make you queen I won't die lonely I'll have it all prearranged A grave that's deep and wide enough For me and all my mountains o'things

  Tracy Chapman

  Dream, Lonely, Queens

  Song: Mountains o' Things, Album: Tracy Chapman, 1988

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• For why, my brothers and sisters, would you rejoice in silver? Either your silver will perish, or you will, and no one knows which will perish first. For neither can you remain here always, nor can silver remain here always; so also with gold, wardrobes, houses, money, real estate-and in the end, even the light by which we enjoy all these things. So do not be willing then to rejoice in such things as these. Rejoice instead in the light that has no setting; rejoice in the dawn which no yesterday precedes, and no tomorrow follows.

  Saint Augustine

  Brother, Real, Light

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• But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.

  William Ralph Inge

  Powerful, Men, Average

  William Ralph Inge (1920). “Outspoken Essays”

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• The gospel preached during every television show is 'You only go around once in life, so get all the gusto you can.' It is a statement about theology; it is a statement about beer. It's lousy beer and even worse theology.

  John Silber

  Beer, Gusto, Television

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