Ice Cube Quotes

I'm not against people having new cars. I'm against them having you. We spend a tremendous amount impressing somebody at the stoplight who we'll never meet. It makes you broke and keeps you broke.

If advertising encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.

What do you think it is that drives people to want far more than they could ever use or need? I frankly think it's insecurity. How do we let the world know that the trappings of this life are not the things that are ultimately important for being accepted?

In a monetary system, most of us live near our work with a house, car, and lifestyle we can afford (or, all too often, cannot afford), rather than the one we prefer. We are only as free as our purchasing power permits. Even many wealthy people today select a residence mainly to impress others with their status. Lacking a true sense of self worth, many live to impress others.

Many a family, in order to make a 'proper showing,' will commit itself for a larger and more expensive house than is needed, in an expensive neighborhood. Almost everyone would, it seems, like to keep up with the Joneses.

If you're a young black dude from the hood you want to come through the hood in a car that makes a lot of noise.

Because Elvis gave 'em cars, you think I'm cheap.

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.

[We are] persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

Take most people, they are crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, they are always talking about have many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that is even newer. I do not even like old cars. . . . I'd rather have a horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

People will buy the car just because it's a great car. We want them to think it's excellent value for money and then, oh yeah, it happens to be electric.

People don't want to be millionaires - they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.

I've also been documenting an unsustainable way of life. And you see in peoples' stories that this world of consumerism does not support the moral and spiritual values - of family and community - that people feel are most important. From an environmental perspective, the quest for more and more is not going to be possible on this planet. This is a historical documentation of an unsustainable path, and my hope is that this work allows people to think about their own agency and the potential for change.

Nobody's about saving anymore. No one cares about a rainy day anymore. Nobody saves up enough for even an umbrella for a rainy day. It's sad. It really is a new form of slavery. We used to work to be able to afford material things. Now we work for these things. They're the boss. That house you can't afford, that car that's out of your price range, that cellphone that drains your bank account - that's your boss.

Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction.

The scientific world, the materialistic world, the world of commerce, the world of business, the world of individualism, the world of capitalism, world of communism - all these worlds are the old story now. Where we think we exploit nature, we exploit people. Market rules, profit rules, money rules. We work for name, fame, power, money, profit. That's the old story.

Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.

Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.

Marketing is all pervasive. They're getting marketed products they can't afford - can't ever hope to acquire. They believe the only way they're ever going to achieve happiness is the acquisition of these products. Products they can't afford. They see people living that lifestyle, and they have that lifestyle beamed incessantly into their minds through media, which you know I participate in.

Some people put more into their cars than they put into their relationships.

High thinking is inconsistent with a complicated material life based on high speed and imposed on us by mammon worship.

I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I'm still living in one!... The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs -- all the old clubs -- are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.... Where is this 'vanished world' they talk about? I don't think the critics have looked out the window!

Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.

I don't think people today need to derive security from possessions.

A lot of times people would offer me movies and, because I'm a car freak, I'd look in a magazine and say, 'How much is this car? If you give me this car I'll show up and do the movie' I call 'em 'sports car flicks'.