meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain, but from being weary of pleasure.....It is not pain that has driven the West into emptiness, it has been the drowning of meaning in the oceans of our pleasures.

a solemn reminder not to make our goal in life one of sheer material pursuit. The allurement is great, and the disappointments are proportionate.

I don't want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.

And both are gone. And ironically, I'm drawn to repeat my well known apothegm of futility: that, just as the person who wants praise will never be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And I therefore still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die. Fortunately, I've been able to get by very neatly without doing either.

Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself. Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.

One Way to think of the market ideology and the empire is that it produces alienation and loss of human vitality. The culture flows from the assumption that the accumulation of commodities will make us safe and happy.

In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.

They imagined that with a rightly honored commodity they could "purchase" security in a world that seemed devoid of the creator. "Godmaking" amid anxiety is a standard human procedure! But

The dominant value system of our commodity society is to marginalize that human dimension, a marginalization that is epitomized in the loss of the arts from school budgets and the making of money as the definition of a "career" and therefore the measure of education.

Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly "rest-less," inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire. Those requirements concern endless predation so that we are a society of 24/7 multitasking in order to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess.

That is why one of Rich's most powerful songs, and one he enjoyed singing in concert more than any other, is "Greed.

Public virtue is the vital spirit of republics, and history proves that when this has decayed and the love of money has usurped its place, although the forms of free government may remain for a season, the substance has departed forever.