Andy Rooney Quotes

Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear.

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

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

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

I love how the reality of fashion is all about something for that moment and then the extremity of dismissal.

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.

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

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.

Nowadays music is as disposable as a McDonald's wrapper.

Let's face it, we're all clones nowadays. We've all got the same archives, we've all got the same Hyundai, we've all got the same Mac or PC components, and we're all being told the same news stories globally.

America is a very venal place; everything has to be sold there. You can repackage your own s**t and sell it if it is marketed in the right way. The motivation is to sell. It's so illogical and strange to me. It's such a disposable culture and yet I feel comfortable being American.

It's like, are you kidding me? I'd sell way more if I just put a picture of my face. That's the fact. I'd sell more copies of me just looking cute. That's what sells more. That's what sells at Wal-Mart. Not someone in a bathtub looking like they're about to kill someone. Topless.

by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

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

Anyway, if you needed something really dangerous, get a gun. It's easy, it's cheap, and it's the American way.

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.

You see somewhere along the way, we've allowed the pursuit of fame and things to blind us to the issues that prevent us from moving upward.

The remedy [for the Great Depression] is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others, . . . the American way.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a 'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.

If there was a way to recognize something you'd never seen but still knew by heart, I felt it as I looked at his face. Finally, someone understood.

The notion that you would initiate a new product without preparing the way by persuasion and advertising and salesmanship is fantastic. It's an integral part of the system.