#materialism

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society. ↗

— Malcolm Muggeridge

#materialistic #mysticism #only #possible #religion

In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#center #education #era #materialism #must

Happiness will come from materialism, not from meaning. ↗

— Andrei Platonov

#come #materialism #meaning #will

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928) ↗

— Clare Winger Harris

#material-possessions #materialism #possessions #uselessness #wasted-time

Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home? ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#possessions #technology #travel #beauty

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town. ↗

— George Saunders

#ascendant #becoming #cloth #dresses #especially

More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode, harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right. ↗

— Jack Schwartz

#assumed #both #dominant #faith #gave

There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents. --"Bomar ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#money-not-happiness #beauty

I think at the heart of so much restlessness of the day is a spiritual vacuum. There is a yearning for meaningful lives, a yearning for values we can commonly embrace. I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses. ↗

— Bill Moyes

#hope #materialism #life

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture... by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair. ↗

— Thomas Nagel

#evolution #id #intelligent-design #macroevolution #materialism