The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem; not an economic one. ~Paul Heyne


The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. ~Mad Magazine


There must be more to life than having everything!? ~Maurice Sendak


After a visit to the beach; it's hard to believe that we live in a material world. ~Pam Shaw


U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks. ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement; Christian Science Monitor; 1990


Do not trouble yourself much to get new things; whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. ~Henry David Thoreau


You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy. ~Eric Hoffer


Forethought and temperance are the virtues which produced thrift; and with thrift the economic progress of society. And those are the virtues which today are gravely compromised. ~Adriano Tilgher


Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. ~Edward Abbey


I may be a pessimist; but the philosophy of anti-thrift just now coming into being seems to me the greatest danger to the peace of the world. ~Adriano Tilgher


Mammon; n.:? The god of the world's leading religion. ~Ambrose Bierce


Oh; for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money. ~Author Unknown


Racial injustice; war; urban blight; and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system. ~Channing E. Phillips; speech; Washington; D.C.; 22 April 1970


The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more. ~Kin Hubbard


The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not; as poverty was before; the result of natural scarcity; but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently; the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~John Berger


Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes; working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. ~From the movie Fight Club; based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk


To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year. ~Elwyn Brooks White


Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't. ~Mignon McLaughlin; The Second Neurotic's Notebook; 1966


Who covets more; is evermore a slave. ~Robert Herrick


Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need; but not every man's greed. ~Mohandas K. Gandhi; quoted in E.F. Schumacher; Small Is Beautiful


You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need. ~Vernon Howard


God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation; it would strip the world bare like locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi


He who buys what he does not need steals from himself. ~Author Unknown


In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea. ~Richard Bach


Nature provides a free lunch; but only if we control our appetites. ~William Ruckelshaus; Business Week; 18 June 1990


Once again; we come to the Holiday Season; a deeply religious time that each of us observes; in his own way; by going to the mall of his choice. ~Unknown