Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. - Daniel Bell

What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e.g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.

Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world.

That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.