George said: "You know we're on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without."

... I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are only really useless lumber.

How they piled the poor little craft most high with fine clothes and big houses ...; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with - oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! -the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore ...

It is lumber, man - all lumber! throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars ... you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety or care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness ... throw the lumber over, man!

JEROME K JEROME - Three Men in a Boat (1890)

But just as he was putting his head under his wing a large drop of water fell on him ... then another fell ... " What is the use of a statue if it cannot keep the rain off", he said. " I must look for a good chimneypot" and he determined to fly away ... [But then] he looked up and saw - ah, what did he see? The eyes of the Happy Prince were filled with tears, and tears were running down his golden cheeks. His face was so beautiful in the moonlight that the little swallow was filled with pity.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I am the Happy Prince."

"Why are you weeping then?" asked the swallow." You have quite drenched me".

"When I was alive and had a human heart" answered the statue " I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Around the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond, everything about me was so beautiful. My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived, and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high, that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead, yet I cannot choose but weep."
OSCAR WILDE - The Happy Prince

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS - The Naked Lunch

The commercialization of everything means of course you're putting a commercial value on everything. and you turn yourself from a citizen into a consumer... Politics is a commodity to be sold. But then it became that everything was given, in a sense, a price tag. And the price tag became the only gospel. And that gospel, in the end, is a very thin gruel indeed. And if you start measuring humankind in those terms, everything else becomes secondary or less important, or, in some sense, as I say, laughable.
DENNIS POTTER, Live Interview

WAGES

The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is the world we live in.

The work-cash-want circle is the vicious circle
that ever turned men into fiends.

Earning a wage is a prison occupation and a wage earner is a sort of gaol bird.
Earning a salary is a prison overseer's job, a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.

Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.

This is called universal freedom.

DH LAWRENCE