Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and t...he geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows ... the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to... possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water..., made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.... Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due; But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover; The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You will belong to that minority which, according to current Washington doctrine, must be protected in its affluence lest its ener...gy and initiative be impaired. Your position will be in contrast to that of the poor, to whom money, especially if it is from public sources, is held to be deeply damaging.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The City of New York is currently undergoing a grave experiment that affects the comfort and, on occasion, the safety of even the ...most casual visitor. The experiment consists in seeing whether a city of that size can be operated on a far smaller amount of money than would make its life tolerable and a still smaller amount than would make it agreeable. The richer New Yorkers ... are cooperating with an enthusiasm that the affluent rarely show for social experiment, and at great personal expense. They are paying for private security guards in unprecedented numbers and costly private schooling for their children ... and they are accepting numerous other costs and inconveniences in order to show that private affluence is consistent with public squalor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slumism is the pent-up anger of people living on the outside of affluence. Slumism is decay of structure and deterioration of the ...human spirit. Slumism is a virus which spreads through the body politic. As other "isms," it breeds disorder and demagoguery and hate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passag...e from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no great religious leader--from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther--who offered people what they want. On...ly what they need. But television is not well-suited to offering people what they need. It is "user friendly." It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »