When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides?

We need to recognise that what really matters isn't buying more and more consumer goods but family friends and knowing that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives. Helping to reduce the appalling consequences of world poverty should be part of that reassessment.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

The experience is fundamentally different for buying from local businesses than it is for buying consumer goods.

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field the results have been disastrous.

How much do you as a consumer value a positive experience with a brand or its customer service department? How willing are you to share that with your friends? How inclined are you to let that person know that you're interaction with them was positive?

Our DNA is as a consumer company - for that individual customer who's voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That's who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it's not up to par it's our fault plain and simply.

To be able to design for the plus-sized consumer for me that's just beyond. It's a dream.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Americans are gathering the courage to just say no. We are saying no to addictive consumer lifestyles. We are saying no to wars and corporate takeover and the IMF loans that gobble up people and their resources.

And looking at today's music scene I think it's cool that there are a lot of consumers and fans not limited by what radio and the record companies tell them to buy.

What is sure is that technological change is accelerating in all directions and like children playing in a fountain consumers are reveling in the experience.

The new dynamics between brands and consumers driven by social media are proving to be a powerful impetus for change.

We need a number of solutions - we need more efficiency and conservation. Efficiency is a big one. I think car companies need to do a lot better in producing more efficient cars. They have the technology we just need to demand them as consumers.

In principle there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending business investment and exports and trade.

The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.

In the coming years if not sooner social media will become a powerful tool that consumers will aggressively use to influence business attitudes and force companies into greater social responsibility - and I suggest move us towards a more sustainable practice of capitalism.

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.

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes according to Ralph Nader who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.

The consumer isn't a moron she is your wife.

Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.

The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and now evolutionary biology.