Buy Quotes - page 86
I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn't he deal with some real problems? Why didn't he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him - if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, "God's will.” And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good.
When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn't, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn't believe his battles with criminals, superpowered geniuses and the like.
I never believed in God either.
Charles de Lint
Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.
Horace Mann
On Wednesday my watch broke, so yesterday I went across the street to the saddest mall in America. Half the stores were shuttered up and the fountain had been drained. The food court was gone except for a place called Granny's Fudgery, a wooden cart surrounded by card tables. I imagine the mall started going downhill when it accepted Walmart as a tenant. Anything you could find at Bill's Card Shop and the Record Bin could also be found there, where a customer could pay less and buy everything in one shot. I'd been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored signs and promotional displays. Yesterday's Walmart was even worse than the first, but the employees were incredibly friendly.
David Sedaris
[Letter received to the Banksy website:] "I don't know who you are or how many of you there are but i am writing to ask you to stop painting your things where we live. In particular XXXXXX road in Hackney. My brother and me were born here and have lived here all our lives but these days so many yuppies and students are moving here neither of us can afford to buy a house where we grew up anymore. Your graffities are undoubtably part of what makes these wankers think our area is cool. You're obviously not from round here and after you've driven up the house prices you'll probably just move on. Do us all a favour and go do your stuff somewhere else like Brixton. -daniel" [sic; name and address not withheld].
Banksy
Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger - anything that can blow your candles out! - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura - and so goodbye...
Tennessee Williams
I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven
When I awoke, I spent that on a necklace
I told God I'd be back in a second
Man, it's so hard not to act reckless
To whom much is given, much is tested
Get arrested, guess until he get the message
I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny
And what I do? Act more stupidly
Bought more jewelry, more Louis V
My mama couldn't get through to me
The drama, people suing me
I'm on TV talking like it's just you and me
I'm just saying how I feel, man
I ain't one of the Cosbys, I ain't go to Hillman
I guess the money should've changed him
I guess I should've forgot where I came from.
Kanye West
Oh! what a frightful business is this modern society; the race for wealth - wealth. I am ashamed to write the word. Wealth means well-being, weal, the opposite of woe. And is that money? or can money buy it? We boast much of the purity of our faith, of the sins of idolatry among the Romanists, and we send missionaries to the poor unenlightened heathens, to bring them out of their darkness into our light, our glorious light; but oh! if you may measure the fearfulness of an idol by the blood which stains its sacrifice, by the multitude of its victims, where in all the world, in the fetish of the poor negro, in the hideous car of Indian Juggernaut, can you find a monster whose worship is polluted by such enormity as this English one of money!
James Anthony Froude
My private life has been the subject of much jabbering. Perhaps this slightly scandalous side of me people find entertaining! Before, being a model, it was just a job, and I was making fun of it. But today, I take my career more seriously. The fact that a reader may buy an Armani item because she'd seen it on me in a magazine is very important to me. So much so that I intend to launch my own label.
Milla Jovovich
This is how fucked up I was: I brought a landline so I could keep my fucking phone! I broke with AT&T when they announced that you could buy, for your home, a transmitter for 200 dollars. A 200-dollar transmitter, so that you can help AT&T build the infrastructure you thought you were getting when you brought the piece of shit! I don't think-- We don't know, do we, what a cellphone does to us? Imagine what a transmitter will do! I believe that your shit'll be glowing in a week! "Honey, have we been eating phosphorous?!" Here's the kicker: AT&T is then gonna charge you twelve dollars a month to use the transmitter you already brought from them, so that AT&T successfully turns your cellphone BACK INTO A FUCKING LANDLINE, ASSHOLE!
Lewis Black
Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model, heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.
William Gibson
• It's O.K. to be ambitious.
• It's O.K. to look out for Number One. ...
• It's O.K. to be a winner.
• And it's always O.K. to be rich.
A word of caution: people will tell you that success can't buy you happiness. This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.
Michael Korda
Exxon/Mobile, Pfizer, Citigroup, General Motors, Lockheed/Martin, Proctor & Gamble, United Health Care, Comcast/NBC Universal, Apple, and many other giants garner revenues as large as numerous nation states... Most are global... but there is no public global government holding them accountable... [T]here are dictatorial trade agreements that corporatists conjure up to subordinate the general population's labor, consumer, and environmental protections-a stunning end-run around our courts and legislatures. These protections are seen as "non-tariff trade barriers"... [T]hese... entities have a clear and obsessive unity of purpose-money for bosses... for shareholders, money to buy lawyers and politicians to take down laws and whatever else slows the pace of hoarding wealth.
Ralph Nader
Ruben Fleischer: "..The principle idea behind M.I.A.'s artwork is to have pretty heavy/political ideas, but to present them in a poppy candy-coated wrapper. So someone might buy her painting because it is pretty to the eye, and not necessarily consider that it is a rebellious image that she is presenting. However, after they've had it for a while, they might start to think - why do I have a pink tank on my wall? ... I think that ["Galang"] is a very successful video in that we have true images of revolution playing on MTV. However, because there's lots of pretty colors and a pretty girl dancing, no one blinks an eye. Hopefully we have succeeded in subconsciously starting the revolution." May, 2005 [after directing music video for "Galang"].
M.I.A.
When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory" - an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.
Peter Singer
The whole supermarket itself is designed to break down your sense of having any life outside the supermarket. It's like a casino: there's no clocks, no windows, no easily-accessible exits. You ever not buy anything in the supermarket and try to get out of there? It's impossible. There's no way out.
Jerry Seinfeld
I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction - toward anarchy, poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.
Hunter S. Thompson
