Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing… you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn’t affect two-thirds of the people of the world.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

Money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

People concerned about inflation today tend to buy big houses and nice cars.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them.

I think about food literally all day every day. It’s a thing.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification.

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

I think everybody has something that they’ve been obsessed about in their lifetime.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

We are moving towards a world that is reordering itself and that may appear more ordered at some periods of time, but I see no sign that we are moving towards a world order in my definition of it – namely, a system which is accepted, which is internalized by the majority of the key participants.

We can choose a future where we export more products and outsource fewer jobs. After a decade that was defined by what we bought and borrowed, we’re getting back to basics, and doing what America has always done best: We’re making things again.

Babylon is everywhere. You have wrong and you have right. Wrong is what we call Babylon, wrong things. That is what Babylon is to me. I could have born in England, I could have born in America, it make no difference where me born, because there is Babylon everywhere.

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.

I’m sick of the tabloids‘ saying I obsess over guys. Why would you obsess over guys? They don’t like it.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

So many girls come up and say to me, ‚I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.‘ That’s the coolest compliment to me.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

I like sweaters. I have a sweater obsession, I guess.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.

If you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can’t be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer… you’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.

I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

To do anything to a high level, it has to be total obsession.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

When you bring in multi-brand retail items into the country, you’re not just bringing the products, but you’re also harming local manufacturers.

I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

I like to talk about my obsession with french fries because I don’t want people to think that ‚Let’s Move‘ is about complete, utter deprivation. It’s about moderation and real-life changes and ideas that really work for families.