Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

That feeling of freedom, open highways of possibilities, has kind of been lost to materialism and marketing.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence has itself betrayed us.

I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.

Democracy, and man-made laws in general, correlate closely with consumer culture.

Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.

While the Cold War had us questioning our next-door neighbors, big brands emerged to capture our trust. We became consumers.

I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.

In ancient times, we were users; we used the commodities in accordance to our needs. Using is not sufficient for the modern market; it needs consumers. Consuming means consuming things much more than the natural need of humanity or of any living being.

Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.

It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.

We grew up in a very material-lacking socialist society, but today China is a capitalist society. It's very materialistic. It's full of desire and luxury goods.