Roger von Oech Quotes

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

I have always been interested in garbage: What it says about us. What in there embarrasses us, and what we can't bear to part with. Where it goes and how much of it there is. How it endures. What it might be like to work with it every day.

Sooner or later, all magazines end up in the toilet.

For every new thing that I buy, I have to throw something out.

There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

We live in a disposable, 'cast-off and throw-away' society that has largely lost any real sense of permanence. Ours is a world of expiration dates, limited shelf life, and planned obsolescence. Nothing is absolute.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

Time destroys everything.

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

I believe that the end of things man-made cannot be very far away - must be near at hand.

Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

The cheap and easy days of waste disposal are over.

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill.

On the one hand, we're constantly told about recycling and cutting back, and on the other hand we have to buy the next gadget that comes along three weeks after the last one you bought. It's absolutely insane. We've been suckered into buying and buying and upgrading and upgrading. We're being given two very different mantras at the moment, I think.