Home / Quotes / Quote by Joy Davidman

Quote by Joy Davidman

“No one who had once learned to identify happiness with wealth ever felt that he had wealth enough.”

Book:Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments

Work

Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments

Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments delves into the origins and meanings of the Ten Commandments, providing a scholarly examination of their impact on religious and cultural thought. The book examines the commandments from various perspectives, including historical, theological, and philosophical, offering readers a comprehensive understanding of their enduring relevance. more

Author

Joy Davidman

Joy Davidman, a British poet, was born on April 18, 1915, and passed away on July 13, 1960. Her poetry is known for its unique style and profound emotion, and is widely regarded as an important voice in 20th-century British literature. more

“Our present culture, however, specializes in inflaming endless lust for possessions with advertisements that constantly convince us that we need more (particularly to create the ease we have never found). The marketers don't tell us much about their products, but they spend a great deal of energy (and enormous amounts of money) appealing to our fears and dreams. Thus, the idolatry of possessions plays to the deeper idolatry of our selves-and in an endlessly consuming society, persons are always remaking themselves with new belongings.”

“Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame?”

“Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.”

Firsts Problem Mother Capitalism First Time Environmental Consumption Consumerism Controversial Overconsumption Environmental Problems

Author:Kalle Lasn

“Overpopulation is the problem of the third and fourth World; over-consumption is the problem of the West. The average American child this year will consume as much of the world's resources as twenty children born in India. Deliberate and calculated waste is the central aspect of the American economy. We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air.”

“Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.”

“Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar.”

“So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.”

Quote by Joy Davidman

Work

Author

You May Also Like