A Quote by David Foster Wallace

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

David Foster Wallace

Quote Topics

Assumption Capitalism Complacent Consumer Disease Else Everyone Everyone Else Like Like You Solipsism World

Quote Author

David Foster Wallace
American - Writer
February 21, 1962 - December 12, 2008

Well, capitalism is going to grow and grow. The nature of it is that the guy who has the most poker chips on the table has more leverage than everyone else. He can eventually outbluff everyone else and outraise everyone else at the table. That's what has happened and it needs to be corrected.

Simon Baker

The development of capitalism consists in everyone having the right to serve the consumer better or more cheaply.

Ludwig von Mises

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you're saying, 'Our products are like everyone else's, too.'

Jason Fried

It was only in the late nineteenth century and then the twentieth century, with the maturation of consumer capitalism, that a shift was made toward the cultivation of unbounded desire. We must appreciate this to realize that late modern consumption, consumption as we now know it, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physical goods. Affluence and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigeration and indoor plumbing.

Rodney Clapp

If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.

Max Lerner

I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else.

Gary Becker

Addiction is a disease like anything else. It's like cancer, like heart disease, like diabetes.

David Sheff

Socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for everyone else.

Robert Reich

I don't think the western world is questioning capitalism. Capitalism as a concept is not something that society has written off. But today, there is degree of caution around capitalism. We believe in compassionate capitalism. Growth for growth's sake can never be an end in itself.

Kumar Mangalam Birla

Why do people want everyone to act just like they do? Talk like they do. Look like they do. Act like they do. And if you don't— If you don't, people make the assumption that you do not FEEL what they feel. And then they make the assumption— That you must not feel anything at all.

Nora Raleigh Baskin

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

Camille Paglia

There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e.g., social conservatives) of today want family values, less government, and maintain the traditions of society (at least in America's case). However, we must face the cultural contradiction of capitalism: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumer culture, undermines the values which render capitalism possible

Slavoj Žižek

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

Ian Mcewan

You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself. That adage suits consumer capitalism perfectly, since the illusion of changing ourselves is a successfully maintained through shopping.