Jarvis Cocker Quotes

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

It feels so weird to be able to just kind of buy things when I want them or need them.

I love nice things - I consider Ralph Lauren sheets to be a necessity, not a luxury - but I've known what it's like to be poor.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

I think I'm actually quite a materialistic person, I value what it takes to make a car or build a nice house. Money does change things, but how it changes people depends on how they react to it.

And living in Australia I am relatively well off.

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

I was the child at school in second-hand or handmade clothes and, as I grew older, I craved material wealth, a big house and designer clothes.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

The easier things are to buy, the more we consume.

I don't live with the 'right' people. I don't want to. I don't want to live with the rich in Beverly Hills or walk the streets of Hollywood. I want to go to K-mart and get good deals.

As we get rich, the basics of life - food, clothing and shelter - become a very small part of total expenditure. And people have enough money to purchase things that enhance them spiritually, and I mean the word 'spiritual' not necessarily in a religious sense but in the sense that it adds to your feeling of well-being.

The more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, 'Sure, why not?'

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.

In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.

People recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

For a number of years, I've wondered if people like us are the forgotten. We're not the poor, and we're not the rich. We're not the very young or the aged. We're the average American family.

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life.

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.