L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.
Debt has become a part of who we are.
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.
Waiving debts corrupts the credit culture.
It seems like only yesterday that savers were dorks. They kept piggy banks. They drove last year's cars. They fished in their change purses for nickels while the superstars flashed credit cards. Today, values have changed. The new object of veneration is not money on the hoof but money in the bank - and the dorks all have it.
Debt is so ingrained into our culture that most Americans can't even envision a car without a payment ... a house without a mortgage ... a student without a loan ... and credit without a card. We've been sold debt with such repetition and with such fervor that most folks can't conceive of what it would be like to have NO payments.
The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.
Credit is probably more acceptable in American culture than elsewhere.
... in this impersonal world of the nine-digit zip code, credit cards, and numbered bank accounts, in this world of no marriage, late marriage, and remarriage, the operative word in office relationships is 'family.
There is...a spiritual hunger in the world today and it cannot be satisfied...by better cars on longer credit terms.
Politics are receiving a lot of attention because we have nothing else to interest us. No nation in the history of the world was ever sitting as pretty. If we want anything, all we have to do is go and buy it on credit. So that leaves us without any economic problem whatever, except perhaps some day to have to pay for them. But we are certainly not thinking about that this early.
In Puerto Rico, there has developed a culture of taking out loans and not paying them back. That has ended.
No one lives on credit in France because banks don't allow overdrafts and zero percent credit cards do not exist.
We live in a culture built on debt, so we are encouraged to have no self control.
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.
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.
I'm concerned a little bit with the culture of celebrating the fundraise. My dad taught me that when you borrow money it's the worst day of your life.
A world where wages no longer rise still needs consumers. Middle-class purchasing power has been maintained through loans, loans and more loans. The Calvinistic reflex that you have to work for your money has turned into a license for inequality.
Nobody had a credit card when I was a kid. No one had credit card debt. But these big companies and banks wanted to know how to get more money out of people - get them charging things.
Pawn shops have been around for thousands of years - they were the number one form of consumer credit up until the 1950s, but we were vilified by Hollywood. We were easy people to vilify.
