QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Ellen Goodman

“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.”

Philip Slater

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

 

“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

Bertrand Russell

“Money is a great servant but a bad master.”

Francis Bacon

“Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.”

John Ruskin

“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

 

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