materialism

We are born, we suffer, we die. However, love is a possibility for us all and, for some few, there is also a big house."Daniel could not resist asking, because he really wanted to know. "Need they be mutually exclusive? Can't we have both love and house?"Joe smiled. "Certainly. But one must consider carefully how one goes about getting the house.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

But what is the point of buying vegetables in plastic bags? Everything from the supermarket smells of plastic. Everything from the market smells like it__ supposed to.

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson

We are not less because we have less

He fetishized limits.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

A daily portion is all that a man really wants. We do not need tomorrow's supplies; that day has not yet dawned, and its wants are as yet unborn. The thirst which we may suffer in the month of June does not need to be quenched in February, for we do not feel it yet; if we have enough for each day as the days arrive we shall never know want.

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

Life is less a burden without an absolute quest for material possessions

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

This work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand__n England at any rate.

Things that are attached to the body do not just add beauty to the body or probably enhance the self confidence of the man within, but they are also the very reasons for pride and excessive self confidence

Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tuneWe're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soonCaptains of the old order clinging to the reinsAssuring us these aches inside are only growing painsBut it's a long road out of Eden(...)Behold the bitten apple, the power of the toolsBut all the knowledge in the world is of no use to foolsAnd it's a long road out of Eden

Security is by far the city's predominant business.