Erich Fromm Quotes

But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.

In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.

I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.

We live in an era of consumerism and it's all about desire-based consumerism and it has nothing to do with things we actually need.

Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.

I shop more than most women.

Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.

If I go to the department store, I get no excitement: I can buy the entire department store instead of one bag. So I lost excitement of shopping.

Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.

...There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end... Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.

Consumerism is our national religion.

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.

The insanity of consumption bothers me. Talk about the opiate of the masses. It ain't religion anymore. It's stuff.

The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don't seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it's because we're engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves . . . as suppliants admitted to a shrine.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

The conversation of most middle-class Americans, we are told, revolves around consumption: what to buy, what was just bought, where to eat, the price of the neighbor's house, what's on sale this week, our clothes or someone else's, the best car on the market this year, where to spend a vacation. Apparently we can't stop eating, shopping, or consuming. Success is measured not in terms of love, wisdom, and maturity but by the size of one's pile of possessions.

I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money.

I don't really like money - I like the things you can buy with money.

The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey; Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

When I spend money on myself, it's almost always on shoes and clothes. I'm addicted to shoes. I always have been, since I was a kid. When I was young, I could never get the shoes I really wanted.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.