Materialism Quotes
-
The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.
Raoul Vaneigem
-
I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn's boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism.
Ben Lerner
-
Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.
William James
-
Our Saxon ancestors may have been a rude and hardy race, but they did not live in an age of materialism as we do.
Eleanour Sinclair Rohde
-
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
-
Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world ... When the civilised nations in consequence of their wonderful material development, shall have had their spiritual susceptibilities blunted through the agency of a captivating and absorbing materialism, it may be that they have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith.
Edward Wilmot Blyden
-
Why should the simple fact of your having more money entitle you to a greater share of the Earth's limited natural resources?
Shekhar Kapur
-
Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.
Michael Eric Dyson
-
How can we recognize if we're falling into materialism's trap? Christ's words were direct and profound: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" . What we do with our possessions is a sure indicator of what's in our hearts. Jesus is saying, "Show me your checkbook, your credit card statement, and your receipts for cash expenditures, and I'll show you where your heart is." What we do with our money doesn't lie. It is a bold statement to God of what we truly value.
Randy Alcorn
-
Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed.
Mwai Kibaki
-
Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.
Thomas Nagel
-
We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
Wole Soyinka
-
For the uninitiated, “ectoplasm” is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins’s writings on religion.
Edward Feser
-
When social critics deplore the materialism of our time and its preoccupation with money, fame, and superficial values, they overlook that the driving force behind the changes we have seen -- one of the greatest periods of change in history -- has been thought. It wasn't big bucks or social status that drove this change. It was, and is, the force of the play of the mind. As materialistic as we may be, playful thinking got us here.
Edward Hallowell
-
If there is such a thing as spiritual materialism, it is displayed in the urge to possess the mountains rather than to unravel and accept their mysteries.
Wojciech Kurtyka
-
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
Albert Camus