Ask me not what I have, but what I am.

- Heinrich Heine

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

- Louis D. Brandeis

The Greeks had just one word for "economize." Our New England grandmothers had twelve: "Eat it up; use it up; make it do; or do without."

- Helen Lyon Adamson

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

- Christopher Lasch

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

- Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

- Jonathan Swift

Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

- Albert Einstein

Most of what we take as being important is not material, whether it's music or feelings or love. They're things we can't really see or touch. They're not material, but they're vitally important to us.

- Judy Collins

If the level and amount of consumption and waste of the western "rich" countries ever reaches the poor countries, it will mean the end of humanity. The big world corporations are busy doing it.... The production, selling, consumption, accumulation, waste and advertisement explosions in the western "rich" countries and the continued population explosion in the poor countries will turn into major catastrophes.

- Robert Muller

People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.

- Joan Rivers

Worldly riches are like nuts; many a tooth is broke in cracking them, but never is the stomach filled with eating them.

- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in t moral purpose or human interest.

- Archibald Macleish

Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.

- Anthony J. D'Angelo

A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.

- Christopher Lasch

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.



I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them.

- Phyllis Diller



The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

- Anatole France



Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

- Studs Terkel



Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

from "The Matchmaker"

- Thornton Wilder



The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes



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

- Eric Hoffer



If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

- Henry David Thoreau



The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.

- Kahlil Gibran



There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the Haves and the Have-nots.

- Miguel de Cervantes