Materialism quotes

Page 1

◆ If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

- John Lennon100

◆ Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson99

◆ The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

- Benjamin Disraeli99

◆ But I do know we're deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don't satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

- Mitch Albom99

◆ How good something is should never be determined by its cost, designer, origin, or its perceived value by others.

- Ashly Lorenzana99

◆ When somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money.

- H.L. Mencken99

◆ They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky99

◆ The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.

- Adolf Hitler99

◆ Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

- Khalil Gibran99

◆ Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.

- Michel de Montaigne99

◆ The shame and the downfall of a modern materialistic society is her inability to treasure, care for, admire, adore, cherish, value, revere, respect, uphold, uplift, protect, shield, defend, safeguard, treasure and love her children. I praise all the cultures of this world that naturally harbor and actively manifest these instincts. If a nation or if a population of people fails to recognize the excellent value and distinction of the lives of her children and is defective enough to have lost the capability of expressing and acting upon these instincts then there is nothing that can save that nation or those people. The prosperity of a people is not measured in banks, financial markets, economy and the death of its humanity is evident not through the loss of life but in the loss of love for its children.

- C. JoyBell C.99

◆ The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

- J.G. Ballard99

◆ The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

- Thomas Mann99

◆ There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

- Samuel Johnson99

◆ The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.

- G.K. Chesterton99