Vernon Lee Quotes

There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

In the '70s and '80s, the mentality of America was that everything was disposable. The notion of quality wasn't important.

I was mindful that clothes, objects and items had all been designed and manufactured. Thought had gone into those processes, so to mindlessly treat everything without care or as disposable was disrespectful. Things should be valued.

The idea that things should last just doesn't fit the economic model anymore.

When we think about the trends that millennials are taking toward simplicity, I think it's indicative of a cultural shift toward less of the 'more is more' for materialism sake and more of an emphasis on efficiency, value, and sustainability.

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.

Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

On the one hand, we're constantly told about recycling and cutting back, and on the other hand we have to buy the next gadget that comes along three weeks after the last one you bought. It's absolutely insane. We've been suckered into buying and buying and upgrading and upgrading. We're being given two very different mantras at the moment, I think.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

The fundamental dogma of Modernism - that, if the past is irrelevant to the future, then today is irrelevant to tomorrow - has created a throwaway society of disposable objects. That is sick.

These parks are our life's work, not the clothing chains we created, selling people clothes they don't need.

The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all.

Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!

Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.

It's always consoling to know that today's Christmas gifts are tomorrow's garage sales.

Every conflict is emblematic of the throwaway culture.

Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.