Bill McKibben Quotes

Above and beyond the question of how to grow the economy there is a legitimate concern about how to grow the quality of our lives.

It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being.

Real progress cannot be measured by money alone. We must ensure that economic growth contributes to our quality of life, rather than degrading it

...we must strike a balance so that the protection of our irreplaceable heritage becomes as important as its use. The price of economic growth need not and will not be deterioration in the quality of our lives and our surroundings.

The ultimate purpose of economics, of course, is to understand and promote the enhancement of well-being.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

That is now my mission: to provide a European vision of growth, employment, prosperity - in one word, our future.

People want development. Not everyone knows what it means. Same as jobs. Not everyone knows what a job is, but people want jobs.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

Global poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history.

Now this problem of the adjustment of man to his natural resources, and the problem of how such things as industrialization and urbanization can be accepted without destroying the traditional values of civilization and corrupting the inner vitality of its life—these things are not only problems of America; they are the problems of men everywhere.

The people of this country have been erroneously encouraged to believe that they could keep on increasing the output of farm and factory indefinitely and that some magician would find ways and means for that increased output to be consumed with reasonable profit to the producer.

We define poverty as a shortage of material goods, which justifies the production of more and more material goods. It does not occur to us that it might be more realistic to regard it as an aberrant situation in which more material goods are required than can actually be produced, for then the solution would be to create those socio-economic conditions in which less goods rather than more were required.

Some policies may promote growth in ways that will increase poverty; others may promote growth in ways that will reduce it. Some growth strategies may be good for the environment; others may not be.

More goods and fewer people" is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future.

Growth and prosperity. These are the blocks with which we must build our welfare society.

The current challenge facing the environmental authorities is how to properly deal with the environmental problems caused by economic development.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be the impact of energy on the environment.

… authors generally neglect that growth has lifted billions of people out of grinding poverty and that others may remain poor because of the developed world’s environmental concerns …

Growth can also involve producing services instead of goods. In particular, a major expansion of public and caring services (like child care, education, elder care, and other life-affirming programs) would generate huge increases in GDP and incomes, with virtually no impact on the environment.

Has our society reached the limit of its resources or the maximum of its wealth and prosperity?

If we truly value humanity, life, and all that it represents in its highest form, then we need to do all that we can to promote quality of life over the quantity of life.

Growth is not an objective in itself; we should be concerned with standards of living.

Population needs to be stabilised for sustainable development.

Our vision and commitment is towards the country's progress, its place in the world and the happiness of its people.