material possessions quotes

Anatole France: 

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.

Anthony J. D'Angelo: 

Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.

Eric Hoffer: 

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

Henry David Thoreau: 

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.

Kahlil Gibran: 

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

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

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.

Miguel de Cervantes: 

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

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.

Studs Terkel: 

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.

Thornton Wilder: 

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