Philip Slater Quotes

#1. Most of us would like to end our lives feeling both that we had a good time and that we left the world a little better than we found it.

Philip Slater

#2. Every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

Philip Slater

#3. People can bear anything.

Philip Slater

#4. We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.

Philip Slater

#5. If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.

Philip Slater

#6. Every apathetic individual is a brick in a tyrant's throne.

Philip Slater

#7. Every invention creates new needs, but the biggest needs are not for new and more advanced versions of the last invention but for solutions to the social problems the last invention created.

Philip Slater

#8. Despair ... is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it's a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

Philip Slater

#9. Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

Philip Slater

#10. At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.

Philip Slater

#11. A coincidence is a trend we have decided not to take seriously.

Philip Slater

#12. A true community maximizes the potential of whatever human resources exist within it (by allowing for all possible combinations), while networks minimize such utilization, since it's limited by each individual's capacity to absorb unsettling stimuli (new combinations).

Philip Slater

#13. One of the main reasons wealth makes people unhappy is that it gives them too much control over what they experience. They try to translate their own fantasies into reality instead of tasting what reality itself has to offer.

Philip Slater

#14. We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it.

Philip Slater