(We understand how exhausting it can be to keep scrolling through your Instagram feed to find mindless consumerism being shoved down your throat. It is extremely normal to feel overwhelmed in this time of capitalism. So here are a few quotes to make you feel better!
- Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. ~Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
- God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi
- The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~John Berger
- Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system. ~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 1970 April 22nd
- This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life, 2002
- “The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”
(Analects 4.9)”
― Confucius
- “What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”
― Andy Warhol
- “The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.”
(Analects 4.16)”
― Confucius
- “We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”
― Chuck Palahniuk
- “The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
- “You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “You can't rage against the machine through rebellious consumption.”
― David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
Published by: Vibhuti Vazirani/ 2019-12-19