#consume

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers. ↗

— John Twelve Hawks

#consumer #news #television #tv #death

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management. ↗

— George Monbiot

#economics #environment #government #shopping #design

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

#capitalism #consumerism #dfw #solipsism #dreams

If doctors are paid the same salary as bus drivers, community would not be crazy about making their children doctors ↗

— Nouman Ali Khan

#consumerism #doctor #education #salary #education

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn’t have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained or why it is possessed. Once enough people join in, like with oversized glasses frames or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again. You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions. You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make—those are only details. ↗

— David McRaney

#consumerism #experience

Death is the great hope of all life; the desire to expend itself; to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself. ↗

— Bryant H. McGill

#death #desire #expend #great #great hope

No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it. ↗

— Helen Keller

#happiness #producing #right #without

There's an absolute surety to the hands-on conservation lifestyle of hunting, fishing and trapping where you know you're going to consume today. ↗

— Ted Nugent

#conservation #consume #fishing #going #hands-on

Consumers are increasingly feeling that they are being taken for a ride. ↗

— Larry Craig

#consumers #feeling #increasingly #ride #taken

Living standards in both the public and private sector have to be brought down. The private sector has to sell more abroad and consume less at home. The government sector has to get closer to just spending what it can collect in taxes. ↗

— John Redwood

#both #brought #closer #collect #consume