Quotes about consumer (835 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Teachers also say that teaching for learning how-to-learn-learn will consume a lot of time. It will be difficult to cover all the content specified by the curriculum if learning uses up too much time on hands-on activities. The less-is-more alternative has not been considered as a possible solution at all in educational reforms where only expanding will bring about progress and development is more. Now is an appropriate time for educators to come down to the heart of educational matters or the learning methods to achieve the less-is-more alternative in all educational reforms.”

Sukavich Rangsitpol (1935) Thai politician

Teacher

Time , Heart , Learning , Teachers

“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”

Egon Schiele (1890–1918) austrian painter

Light

“All the loving acts that two human beings are capable of, the simple act of holding hands can often become the most intimate. Why is this so? Basically, because the nature of the hands and feet is such that the energy system finds expression in these two parts of the body in a very singular way. Two palms coming together have far more intimacy than the contact between any other parts of the body. You can try this with yourself. You don’t even need a partner. When you put your hands together, the two energy dimensions within you (right-left, masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, yin-yang, etc.) are linked in a certain way, and you begin to experience a sense of unity within yourself. This is the logic of the traditional Indian namaskar. It is a means of harmonizing the system. So, the simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Love , Life , World , Way

“Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

No record of this quotation appears to exist in German.
In The World Crisis, Vol I: 1911-1914 https://books.google.com/books?id=6l6Fgnz8fXIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false (originally published in 1923), Winston Churchill asserted that during the July Crisis, German shipping magnate and diplomat Albert Ballin told him that Bismarck had said to him, "that one day the great European War would come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans" a year before his death.
The full quote above appears in "European Diary" by Andrei Navrozov, in Chronicles Vol. 32 (2008) as a comment during the Congress of Berlin in 1878. "European Diary" is a series of excerpts from Navrozov's unpublished (as of 2017) novel in English, Earthly Love: A Day in the Life of a Hypocrite.
Disputed

Men

“A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person… but falls instead into the same moral category as an animal – of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest). On the other hand, there are members of the human species who are capable of understanding the [value of the division of labor] but…who knowingly act wrongly… [B]esides having to be tamed or even physically defeated [they] must also be punished… to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully teach them a lesson for the future.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.173

Understanding , Nature , Future , Animals

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Star , Night

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

People , Feeling , Decision

“The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triump die, like fire and powder
Which, as they kiss, consume”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Kiss

“she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Youth , Beauty , Drink , Loneliness

“Now I see that I will never find the light
Unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel,
Consuming myself.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Light

“Consume according to your requirements and contribute the rest to the society through Dasoha.”

Basava (1134–1196) a 12th-century Hindu philosopher, statesman, Kannada Bhakti poet of Lingayatism

Basavanna's Preachings

“Alas! that my body, clean and whole, never been corrupted, today must be consumed and burnt to ashes!”

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint

As quoted by Jean Toutmouille during the retrial after her execution (5 March 1449), as quoted in Jeanne d'Arc, maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France (1902) by T. Douglas Murray

“Perhaps I have not been made for the pure, expansive waters, but for those which are small and readily accesible. And perhaps my craving for another source, which gives me the expression of someone in search of food, perhaps this craving is a whim - and nothing more. Yet surely those rare moments of self-confidence, of blind existence, of happiness as intense and serene as an organ playing - surely those moments prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this longing which consumes my whole being is not merely some whim? Moreover, that whim is the truth!”

Clarice Lispector book Near to the Wild Heart

Near to the Wild Heart (1943), p. 65

Truth , Food , Confidence , Search

“His [ Van Gogh's] pathos is alien to me, especially in my current phase, but he is certainly a genius. Pathetic to the point of being pathological, this endangered man can endanger one who does not see through him. Here a brain is consumed by the fire of a star. It frees itself in its work just before the catastrophe. Deepest tragedy takes place here, real tragedy, natural tragedy, exemplary tragedy. Permit me to be terrified.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 816, in The Diaries of Paul Klee; University of California Press, 1964; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee - Part Three' : Klee as a Secessionist and a Neo-Impressionist Artist http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev.html
1903 - 1910

Star , Nature

“No man who aims at making his life an harmonious whole, pure, complete, and harmless to others, can endure to gratify an appetite at the cost of the daily suffering and bloodshed of his inferiors in degree, and of the moral degradation of his own kind. I know not which strikes me most forcibly in the ethics of this question the injustice, the cruelty, or the nastiness of flesh-eating. The injustice is to the butchers, the cruelty is to the animals, the nastiness concerns the consumer. With regard to this last in particular, I greatly wonder what persons of refinement—aye, even of decency—do not feel insulted on being offered, as a matter of course, portions of corpses as food! Such comestibles might possibly be tolerated during sieges, or times of other privation of proper viands in exceptional circumstances, but in the midst of a civilised community able to command a profusion of sound and delicious foods, it ought to be deemed an affront to set dead flesh before a guest.”

Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) English physician, activist and feminist

Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism (1912); quoted in Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb by Rod Preece (Routledge, 2002), p. 344 https://books.google.it/books?id=Mf6TAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA344.

Life , Food , Feeling , Communication

“The Second World War supplied the occasion for the spending, and Keynesian economics supplied the rationale. But Keynesian fiscal policy had political appeal even before the war demonstrated its economic success. For unlike the various proposals for structural reform, such as vigorous antitrust action or national economic planning, Keynesian economics offered a way for the government to control the economy without having to choose among controversial views of the good society. Where earlier reformers had sought economic arrangements that would cultivate, citizens of a certain kind, Keynesians undertook no formative mission; they proposed simply to accept existing consumer preferences and to regulate the economy by manipulating aggregate demand.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

1. America's Search for a Public Philosophy
Public Philosophy (2005)

War , World , Way , Success

“All that is done and said and thought and suffered upon the Earth combine together, and flow onward in one broad resistless current toward those great results to which they are determined by the will of God.
We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren who built the Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows felled, hewed, and squared the cedars, and quarried the stones, and car»ed the intricate ornaments, which were to be the Temples. Stone after stone, by the combined effort and long toil of Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose; slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years elapsed, before, at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready for the Worship of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine. So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus, moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the blazing brand; and, with no further human agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume and melt each Temple to a smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.
Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!
The issues are with God: To do,
Of right belongs to us.
Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not discouraged at men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor tired of their indifference! Care not for returns and results; but see only what there is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God! Soldier of the Cross! Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be patient and work!”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XIX : Grand Pontiff, p. 321

Men , God , Truth , Justice

“The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Sadness , Way

“Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.”

Marc Bekoff (1945) American biologist

Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

World , Law , Nature , Change

“Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Source: The Death of the Liberal Class

“Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Bogeyman Economics
1980s–1990s, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays (1987)
Source: Compassion Versus Guilt, and Other Essays: And Other Essays

“I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.

I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man's word should be as good as his bond, that character—not wealth or power or position—is of supreme worth.

I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual's highest fulfillment, greatest happiness and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.”

John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) American business magnate and philanthropist

Love , Life , God , Hate

“And where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Rage

“And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

"Why I Am So Wise", 6
Ecce Homo (1888)

Hurtful , Passion

“Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”

Steven Pinker book The Blank Slate

Source: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Food

“I am a man" he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Isabelle and Jace, pg. 534
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Glass (2009)
Context: "I think it's strawberry juice," Isabelle said. "Anyway, it's yummy. Jace?" She offered him the glass.
"I am a man," he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone, woman, and bring me something brown."
"Brown?" Isabelle made a face.
"Brown is a manly color."

Men

“To [aunt] Marie Hill,
Dearest
Why do you tempt me? I really cannot. It's impossible! Be happy? The only thought I have in my mind is to immerse myself in my art, to merge completely with it until I can begin to express what I really feel – and after that to be consumed even more by it. Even if I wanted to, I could not leave here [Worpswede]… I want to live here. I want to 'live' – and develop further as a person and as an artist… Can you understand this? I think you can. And do you approve? I hope so. In any case, I can't do any different..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her aunt Mary Hill, from Worpswede, June 1899; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker – The Letters and Journals, ed: Günther Busch & Lotten von Reinken; (transl, A. Wensinger & C. Hoey; Taplinger); Publishing Company, New York, 1983, p. 135
1899

Hope , Art , Feeling , Understanding

“… we do not consider it as good engineering practice to consume a resource lavishly just because it happens to be cheap.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

Niklaus Wirth (2013) " Project Oberon https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf". Section 2.3, p. 19.

“Do not forget, man, consumed by lust:
you—are the stone, the desert, are death …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Dionysian-Dithyrambs

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (1888)

Death , Forgetting

“We are but numbers, born to consume resources.”
Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati.

Horace book Epistles

Book I, epistle ii, line 27
Epistles (c. 20 BC and 14 BC)

“I can't say that anything has been "exciting". Rather, I would choose the word "interesting". Not too long ago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong conducted a survey to determine which consumer products were using Fuzzy Logic. The result was a thick report, some 150-200 pages long-washing machines, camcorders, microwave ovens, etc. What interested me wasn't the particular applications so much as the breadth of applications-so many products were incorporating Fuzzy Logic.”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

About "What kinds of applications have you been excited to see develop?"
1990s, Interview with Lotfi Zadeh, Creator of Fuzzy Logic (1994)

Universe

“Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

St. 3
The Tower (1928), Sailing to Byzantium http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1575/

Heart , Animals

“For in truth all our justice, morality, all our thoughts and feelings, derive from three or four primordial necessities, whereof the principal one is food. The least modification of one of these necessities would entail a marked change in our moral existence. Were the belief one day to become general that man could dispense with animal food, there would ensue not only a great economic revolution--for a bullock, to produce one pound of meat, consumes more than a hundred of provender--but a moral improvement as well, not less important and certainly more sincere and more lasting than might follow a second appearance on the earth of the Envoy of the Father, come to remedy the errors and omissions of his former pilgrimage. For we find that the man who abandons the regimen of meat abandons alcohol also; and to do this is to renounce most of the coarser and more degraded pleasures of life. And it is in the passionate craving for these pleasures, in their glamour, and the prejudice they create, that the most formidable obstacle is found to the harmonious development of the race.”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist

Source: The Buried Temple (1902), Ch. III: "The Kingdom of Matter", § 5

Life , Alcohol , Pleasure , Truth

“I am only about half alive—a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However—so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Alfred Galpin (27 May 1918), published in Letters to Alfred Galpin edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 18
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , History , Literature , Suicide

“What was it that drove these thousands into the arms of his art — what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered — in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

Art , Music , Sense

“No impetus created by any movement whatever can be immediately consumed, but if it finds an object which has a great resistance it consumes itself in a reflex movement.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight

“In my opinion, it is the industry concerned which should have the chief say in the question of the amount of theoretical training required. It is the industry which uses the products of the schools, and, like every consumer, it has the right to make its wishes known.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Henri Fayol addressed his colleagues in the mineral industry, 1900, p. 909

School , Question , Training

“The average American citizen should have presented to him in a simple and easily comprehended form the truth about the business affairs that affect his daily life as consumer, employee, employer, as investor, as voter. […] There are concrete instances of unfair competition that can be reached under the Federal criminal legislation, and they should be attacked and destroyed in the courts. But the laws should be such that normally, and save in extraordinary, circumstances, there should be no need of recourse to the courts. What is needed is administrative supervision and control. This should be so exercised that the highways of commerce and opportunity should be open to all; and not nominally open, but really open, a consistent effort being made to deprive every man of any advantage that is not due to his own superiority and efficiency, controlled by moral purpose. […] Not only as a matter of justice and honesty, but as a matter of prime popular interest, we should see that this control is so exercised as to favor a proper return to the upright business manager and honest investor.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Life , Truth , Justice , Law

“The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.”

Theodore Levitt (1925–2006) American economist and professor at Harvard Business School

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 10

Idea

“But we betray our most noble past as well if we were to deny the possibility of movement, the possibility of progress; if we were to let cynicism consume us and fear overwhelm us. If we lost hope. For however slow, however incomplete, however harshly, loudly, rudely challenged at each point along our journey, in America, we can create the change that we seek. All it requires is that our generation be willing to do what those who came before us have done: To rise above the cynicism and rise above the fear, to hold fast to our values, to see ourselves in each other, to cherish dignity and opportunity not just for our own children but for somebody else’s child. To remember that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others -– regardless of what they look like or where they come from or what their last name is or what faith they practice. To be honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. To nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth. To nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth. That is our choice. Today, we affirm hope.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)

Children , Fear , Faith , Hope

“If I shall have sufficient strength to improve and amplify what was written and published by me up to now about motion by adding some little speculations, and in particular those relating to the force of percussion, in the investigation of which I have consumed hundreds and thousands of hours, and finally reduced this to very easy explanation, so that people can understand it in less than half an hour of time.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Letter to Giovanni Battista Baliani (1639)

People , Understanding , Time

“It has been shown that, in contrast to everything which classical national economy has hitherto taught, not the producer but the consumer is the ruling factor in economic life.”

Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970) German politician

As quoted Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (1946) by the United States Department of State, Vol. 2, p. 746.

Life

“We can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

World , Suffering , Change , Indifference

“If you consume all your strength of time in worthless matters. And therefore, due to a lack of time and strength cannot work on what’s eternal, how regrettable that would be! You will regret forever.”

Jung Myung Seok (1945) South Korean Leader of New Religious Movement, Poet, Author, Founder of Wolmyeongdong Center

Extracted from Proverbs Blog https://providencepath.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/jung-myung-seok-dont-regret-in-your-life/ ]

Time

“Worm that I am, consumed by passion, cast as bait for selfishness, I must nonetheless love humanity. If I can do this, and insofar as I can do this, I can also love God.”

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) German philosopher

Wurm, der ich bin, von Leidenschaften zerfressen, der Selbstsucht zum Köder hingeworfen, soll ich dennoch den Menschen lieben. Wenn ich dies kann, und sofern ich dies kann, kann ich auch Gott lieben.
Source: The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), p. 82 http://books.google.com/books?id=rZ9RAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA82

Love , God , Passion , Selfishness

“Typing in all lowercase is popular among young people, SMS users, and anyone who feels literacy has become too time-consuming.”

Merlin Mann (1966) American blogger

Twitter http://favstar.fm/users/hotdogsladies/status/890278849
Tweeting as @hotdogsladies

People , Feeling , Time

“My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

An Acre of Grass http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1438/, st. 2
Last Poems (1936-1939)

Life , Truth , Imagination

“Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

Life , Problem , Science , Dependency

“For myself the delay may be compared with a reprieve; for in confidence I assure you, with the world it would obtain little credit that my movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties, without that competency of political skill, abilities and inclination which is necessary to manage the helm.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Comment to General Henry Knox on the delay in assuming office (March 1789)
1780s

Life , World , Peace , Feeling

“A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying.”

Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections

The Corrections (2001)

Life , Money , Health , Pleasure

“If the Conservative Party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. If any consumer good, service or profession so consistently and predictably disappointed or failed in its ostensible main purpose, people would turn their backs on it. It would be overtaken, replaced and driven out of business by a better competitor.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

From 'The Cameron Delusion' (2010)

People , Food , Disappointment , Cars

“It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes; it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Light

“For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and devising new forms. It was a mental state of happiness about as complete as I have ever known in life. … When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven−league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name, and which are used under many other names all over the world. It was, perhaps, providential that the necessities of existence commanded a temporary halt to this consuming activity of the mind.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

The last line is about having to take up a job
My Inventions (1919)

Life , World , Nature , Passion

“Long hours of labour seem to be the secret of the rational and healthful processes, which are to raise the condition of the labourer by an improvement of his mental and moral powers and to make a rational consumer out of him.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. II, Ch. XXI, p. 520.
(Buch II) (1893)

Health , Secret

“Some burn damp faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1516/, st. 11
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Life , World , Dreams

“Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force. One's eyes follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of Death. To north and south and west ajar there are battles on every side. Turn where you will, there is war in every corner of that vastness.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

Death , War , Tear , Heart

“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”

Ivan Illich book Tools for Conviviality

Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ch. 3

Envy

“All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.”

Ludwig von Mises book Socialism

Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)

“Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

“Saint Francis of Assisi… felt called to care for all that exists. His disciple Saint Bonaventure tells us that, “from a reflection on the primary source of all things, filled with even more abundant piety, he would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister’”. Such a conviction cannot be written off as naive romanticism, for it affects the choices which determine our behaviour. If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

§ 11
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home

World , Beauty , Feeling , Nature

“Every body that is moved continues to move so long as the impression of the force of its mover is retained in it, therefore the movement of this wing with violence… will come to move the whole bird with it until the impetus of the moved air has been consumed.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight

Bird

“The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 14.

Appearance

“In many, many fields. I expected people in the social sciences-economics, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, politics, sociology, religion and numerous other areas to pick up on it. It's been somewhat of a mystery to me why even to this day, so few social scientists have discovered how useful it could be. Instead, Fuzzy Logic was first embraced by engineers and used in industrial process controls and in "smart" consumer products such as hand-held camcorders that cancel out jittering and microwaves that cook your food perfectly at the touch of a single button. I didn't expect it to play out this way back in 1965.”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

Response to the question: "How did you think Fuzzy Logic would be used at first?"
1990s, Interview with Lotfi Zadeh, Creator of Fuzzy Logic (1994)

People , Religion , Food , Way

“I've given you a world without Government interference. There is now no advertising campaign, no intercompany deal, no promotion, no action you can't take. You want to pay kids to get the swoosh tattooed on their foreheads? Who's going to stop you? You want to make computers that need repair after three months? Who's going to stop you? You want to reward consumers who complain about your competitors in the media? You want to pay them for recruiting their little brothers and sisters to your brand of cigarettes? You want the NRA to help you eliminate your competition? Then do it. Just do it.”

Max Barry book Jennifer Government

Source: Jennifer Government (2003), Chapter 58

World , Sister , Help , Tattoo

“The breathing of the air,
The song of the sweet nightingale,
The grove and its beauty
In the serene night,
With the flame that consumes, and gives no pains. ~ 39”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom

Pain , Beauty , Night

“Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. … To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

§ 50
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home

World , Way , Birth , Problem

“[On cancer] One of the problems is that the notion of cancer has been so normalized. You hear about it so often, and it's not ok… it's not ok to normalize this disease. And with all of the pinkwashing that goes on —where companies are selling products based on breast cancer month — it's a lovely gesture, but consumers get so used to it that it becomes more normal.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview at Susan G. Komen for the Cure (October 2011) http://www.kstreetkate.net/2011/10/jennifer-beals-honors-promise-talks.html

Love , Disease , Problem

“I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

World , Literature

“The distance at which it can strike, and the destructive power of such a quasi-intelligent machine being for all practical purposes unlimited, the gun, the armor of the battleship and the wall of the fortress, lose their import and significance. One can prophesy with a Daniel's confidence that skilled electricians will settle the battles of the near future. But this is the least. In its effect upon war and peace, electricity offers still much greater and more wonderful possibilities. To stop war by the perfection of engines of destruction alone, might consume centuries and centuries. Other means must be employed to hasten the end.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

War , Peace , Confidence , Intelligence

“There must therefore be a considerable class of persons who have both the will and power to consume more material wealth then they produce, or the mercantile classes could not continue profitably to produce so much more than they consume.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book II, Chapter I, On the Progress of Wealth, Section IX, p. 400 (See also: David Ricardo and aggregate demand)
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)
Context: But such consumption is not consistent with the actual habits of the generality of capitalists. The great object of their lives is to save a fortune, both because it is their duty to make a provision for their families, and because they cannot spend an income with so much comfort to themselves, while they are obliged perhaps to attend a counting house for seven or eight hours a day...
... There must therefore be a considerable class of persons who have both the will and power to consume more material wealth then they produce, or the mercantile classes could not continue profitably to produce so much more than they consume.

Personality , Wealth

“O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Context: O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.

Death , Age , Time

“We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Speech at Progressive Party Convention, Chicago http://www.ssa.gov/history/trspeech.html (17 June 1912)
1910s
Context: We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals.

Business

“We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames.”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist

Death (1912)
Context: It is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant, seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulee whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papilla more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvelous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable event …
And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity, nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing can impoverish.

Death , World , Imagination , Solitude

“When families have less to spend, that means businesses have fewer customers, and households rack up greater mortgage and credit card debt; meanwhile, concentrated wealth at the top is less likely to result in the kind of broadly based consumer spending that drives our economy, and together with lax regulation, may contribute to risky speculative bubbles.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)
Context: So let me repeat: The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe. And it is not simply a moral claim that I’m making here. There are practical consequences to rising inequality and reduced mobility. For one thing, these trends are bad for our economy. One study finds that growth is more fragile and recessions are more frequent in countries with greater inequality. And that makes sense. When families have less to spend, that means businesses have fewer customers, and households rack up greater mortgage and credit card debt; meanwhile, concentrated wealth at the top is less likely to result in the kind of broadly based consumer spending that drives our economy, and together with lax regulation, may contribute to risky speculative bubbles.

Family , Business , Wealth

“Stop consuming images and start producing them. ”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

“Many people, especially in the US, see countries like Sweden or Norway or Finland as role models – we have such a clean energy sector, and so on. That may be true, but we are not role models. Sweden is one of the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to the highest ecological footprints, according to the WWF – if you count the consumer index, then we are among the worst per capita.In Sweden, the most common argument that we shouldn’t act is that we are such a small country with only 10 million inhabitants – we should focus more on helping other countries. That is so incredibly frustrating, because why should we argue about who or what needs to change first? Why not take the leading role?”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

Quoted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious', The Guardian, Emma Brockes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-greta-thunberg-hope-contagious-climate|When (29 June 2019)
2019

Country , Help , People , World

“The political worshipers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1

Way , Imagination , History

“A collectivist-totalitarian economic system, which in the final analysis serves only to glorify and increase the power of the state, can achieve great success in the easily controllable field of the basic industries but it will always remain incapable of serving man, in other words of providing the rich abundance of goods which gives the individual consumer a free choice and which enriches and beautifies his life.”

Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) German politician

The Economics of Success (D. van Nostrand & Co., 1963), p. 281

Life , Success

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
1960s-1970s

World , Wealth

“I do not wish to be a king; I am not anxious to be rich; I decline military command; I detest fornication; I am not impelled by an insatiable love of gain to go to sea; I do not contend for chaplets; I am free from a mad thirst for fame; I despise death; I am superior to every kind of disease; grief does not consume my soul.”

Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer

Original: (la) Regnare nolo: ditescere non libet: prae turam recuso, scortationem odi: navigare ob insatiabilem avaritiam non cupio: de coronis consequendis non dimico: liber sum ab insana gloria cupiditate: mortem contemno: guovis morbi genere superior sum: maror animum non peredit.
Source: Address to the Greeks, Chapter XI, as translated by J. E. Ryland

Soul , Love , Making love , Madness