Materialism Quotes

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. (John Updike)
Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public. View quote
Immanuel Kant
Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism. View quote
Chogyam Trungpa
The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i. e., he must be a dialectical materialist. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive. View quote
Simone Weil
The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. View quote
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem. View quote
John Searle
Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness. View quote
John Searle
We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where. (Wole Soyinka)
Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible-though very unlikely-that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism. View quote
Jerry Coyne
There is direct correlation between a society lacking in artistic vision to lack of social conscience, i. e., crime, poverty, and senseless, violent atrocities, materialism. View quote
Vanna Bonta
Dialectical materialism works like cocaine, let's say. If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man. View quote
Nicolae Ceaușescu
Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works. View quote
Antonio Gramsci
Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx's proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism. View quote
Joseph Stalin
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. View quote
C. S. Lewis
Matters of the heart are important to me. All this materialism and all the money and wealth are things that you don't take to the grave. One day you have it. The next day you don't. View quote
Shari Arison
The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality. View quote
Daniel Pinchbeck
Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious. View quote
Idries Shah
After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared. (Arthur Erickson)
Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over. View quote
Arthur Erickson
This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world. View quote
Arthur Erickson
A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day. View quote
Adam Sedgwick
Materialism is the only form of distraction from true bliss. View quote
Douglas Horton