Quotes about Materialism

A check or credit card, a Gucci bag strap, anything of value will do. Give as you live.

Distinguish between real needs and artificial wants and control the latter.

Will we act, or will we sit on our hands? I don't want to show up on that day only to hear God say, "This nation—where is My church? There's still too much sin, too much covenant with Baal, too much pornography, too much perversion, too much materialism, greed, pride, and arrogance. They have missed their hour of grace; only judgment awaits.

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth—Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it "right off." And until she got it the house was uninhabitable.

Undine Spragg—how can you? her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid bell-boy had just brought in.

What does your worship look like? Anxiety, despair, shopping, primping, acting like someone you aren't, acting stupid when you are smart, or acting like you don't care when you do? Why do you do it? You are hoping that, if you worship it correctly, the idol will give you what you want. But idols are notoriously slow in responding.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.

When the world is worth nothing, then heaven is worth something. I leave every Christian to judge by his own experience, whether we do not overlove the world more in prosperity than in adversity (374) [.]

Americans believe that the bottom line isn't everything, it's the only thing, and America is strangling on that lack of vision."13 Bennis also noted, "It isn't either a bull or a bear market anymore, it's a pig market."14